Still waiting

My dad is still in the hospital and there's a procedure scheduled for tomorrow. He is feeling so well, it's hard to believe he's having problems. He is also being extremely patient (and yes, for those of you who know him, I am not making that up.) I'm here to make sure that Mom gets rest and has moral support, I think. I now fly out on Thursday instead of Tuesday and will still be able to make the wedding in Virginia. The schedule will just be a lot tighter.

So many days in your life you can predict a lot of things that will happen. But for the past few days, I've been living in the land of complete unpredictability. And also, I've been not in control of what's happening. Neither have Mom and Dad. This will eventually make you crazy. Off to do laundry because I only brought a carry on bag and didn't expect to stay this long!

Sevensup --no peanuts

Sometimes things don't work out the way you want. When N flew with me to Shreveport when she was a tiny thing, her Gramma asked her about her flight. Her answer was "Sevensup, no peanuts." I'm afraid this trip to Louisiana falls in that category. Dad is in the hospital having tests run and so none of the three of us, Dad, Mom or me, made it to my niece's wedding yesterday. Thankfully, N had already planned to come and was there to represent our family. She drove up to Shreveport after the wedding reception and Mom and I had a lovely visit with her late last night. My brother and his boy will drop by the hospital today so I'll get to see them there. Dad is feeling well and I feel that he is in very good hands. The Seven-Up this trip was being able to spend a lot of special time with Dad yesterday in waiting rooms. The "no peanuts" was the very obvious lack of wedding in this trip planned especially for that.

Roundabout trip

I learned a lot about the Wilkes-Barre airport in the past few days. My plane kept getting delayed and delayed until I finally realized I wasn't going to make my connection in Atlanta. (And I had had a three-hour window.) Usually I can find someone to talk to in long waits like that, but I ended up being rather quiet for a change and had to overhear a long conversation between a guy and this young schoolteacher about their tattoos. It was one of those you wanted to ignore but had trouble doing so because they were talking loudly in your ear. Word for the day: Sycophant. The guy fawned all over this girl for her bravery in getting a huge ankle tattoo. Yuck!

Rather than have them get me a hotel room in Atlanta and then start out for Shreveport on Friday morning, I offered to go home and have them fly me to Shreveport the next day. So Michael came and picked me up. They actually boarded us on the plane and then we had to get off again at one point. This is when I found out that the last planes leave W-B by about 6PM. So at 6 o'clock the restaurant and snack bar close. You can't even buy a bottle of water after 6. I also learned the next morning that getting to the airport by 5:30 AM for a 6:30 AM flight isn't necessarily early enough. It seems that all their morning flights are at 6AM (so they can make connections in other places) so there was a huge line at the check in counter and at the security gate (of which there is only one!) So note to self and others, get there plenty early for a redeye flight, especially if you have to check bags.

Once I got to Atlanta things went a lot better and it was an uneventful trip after that. The Shreveport airport was unrecognizable as they have built a new terminal since I last arrived there. But we passed the old building on the way out. I have some really vivid memories of that terminal.

My parents are great and doing well. We are looking forward to the wedding today.

Flight to LA

I'm almost packed for my trip to Louisiana. I always check the TSA website for updates to the rules about what you can carry on. I don't check bags unless I absolutely have to so I want to be able to carry everything on board.

They now allow nail files (I have one that really looks like a weapon which I will be leaving at home--I don't care what they say), corkscrews and scissors shorter than 4 inches but do not allow pool cues, snow globes and gel shoe inserts. I'm just amazed at what the thinking is. Musicians are having a heck of a time traveling because in some cases they cannot buy an extra ticket for their instrument.

I'm thinking I need to write a suspense novel about a hijacking by tuba.

Old-fashioned department store

I was looking for some special pantyhose for these weddings coming up and called Macy's. The lady there said that they had sold out for the season. (What?? People don't buy pantyhose all summer?) Anyway, I tried Boscov's which is a department store downtown and the lady there said they had plenty and that they had colors that were very fair (for the whiter shade of pale like myself).

I went and parked the car in a pay parking lot. (This reminded me of old-time shopping trips with my mom in downtown Shreveport. Then I entered this real time warp of a department store. It looked exactly like Selber Bros., Rubinstein's, and Goldring's in Shreveport used to look with big glass counters and lots of mirrors. The perfume counters are in the middle as you come in, followed by jewelry followed by the escalators (this store had four floors!). And the clothing was pretty time-warpy too. The seventies-style polyester smock tops were sending me right back to my early married days. The store has everything from a beauty salon to photo finishing place to restaurant.

And yes, they had plenty of pantyhose like I needed. And I bought a great set of flannel sheets for our very pudgy and hard-to-fit mattress 75 per cent off. Michael had said we weren't going to be stoic like the last time we lived in a cold climate. Our stoicism then was pretty much determined by our lack of funds. So he said we would have remote car starters and warm clothes and flannel sheets.

I looked for American Quilter magazine (which features a photo spread and an interview with my firstborn this quarter) but the local Barnes and Nobles downtown doesn't have much in the way of magazines. Disappointing.

The best thing that happened today was that I got to talk to MF and her two, M and V. M was excited to count backwards from twelve and V sang her ABC song. Tomorrow I leave for Shreveport, so will probably have limited time to blog. The weather is so gorgeous here, it's a shame to leave. It would be much more fun to miss a blizzard.

The picture is not of a deparment store obviously. I realized I hadn't posted a picture for a while so here's an oldie but a goodie from our trip to France in 2006. I call it "White-haired man with white bear." I love this statue in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It's by Francois Pompon. I love the simplicity of it. He said he was trying to portray the "very essence of the animal."

Meeting the neighbors

Found out this morning when is the best time for meeting the neighbors. 6:00 AM. I met two folks I hadn't met before because they were out walking their enormous dogs. It was beautiful out at that hour--I am getting acclimated, I didn't even wear a sweater. It's now 3:35 PM and it's still only up to 77 degrees.

Today I took books back to the Back Mountain library. This is a really cool place. They converted their old high school into a public library. I decided to put Eclipse on hold as I had read the second in the Twilight series (by Stephenie Meyer) at Georgia's house. I was surprised to be first on the hold list. So I ought to be able to read it soon.

They have two cool ideas. One is a club you pay money once a year to join. This gives you first crack at the latest new books which they buy for the use of the club members. They also have a set of books which are checked out for one week only. This allows them to circulate new and popular books more readily. Their big deal is an antique auction in July. It's evidently quite amazing and involves much more than antiques. It sounds more like a community fair than anything. My library card isn't just good here in Back Mountain. It can also used in all the libraries in the county including the big Osterhout library in Wilkes-Barre. It's on my list of places to visit because it was built with the consultation of Melvil Dewey and is a renovation of a Presbyterian church from the mid-1900s. I am pretty sure my dad has been there, probably to do his research papers for high school. It's been around so long, they opened a children's section in 1904! They unfortunately lost 69,000 books and all their newspapers and magazines in the Hurricane Agnes flooding in the 70s. (See a previous post about the tendency for natural disaster around here.) We were so pleased that the University of Iowa library that we love so well was saved recently with the help of many volunteers.

It's a good thing they have such great libraries around here since they have no stores like Denton's Recycled Books and Records. That store was amazing. Almost every time I was in there, someone from out of town was in there stocking up because their community didn't have anything like it. My daughter and son-in-law who live in the Czech Republic used to buy books by the sackful when they visited us. Alas, they won't be able to do that here. I tried to find a used book store when we first moved here. I finally found one of the used book stores listed in the phone book. I was careful to do so during its wacky and random opening hours. But alas, it still wasn't open. And judging from the size of it, there wasn't much in it.

Jed and Ellie Mae

We have new oil barons in the family. My parents are selling the drilling rights to the natural gas underneath their property for a tidy sum. The actual drilling will be far from their property so it won't change their quality of life. It seems oil drillers have new ways of extracting the natural gas that they are pretty sure exists below Shreveport. Dad says that the mineral rights revert back to you if you've owned your property for more than ten years in Louisiana. Since they've been there since the 50s, I think they're set. If the drillers do find gas, my parents should start getting checks. Momma has started to call Dad "Jed" which makes her either Granny or Ellie Mae. I definitely think she's much more of an Ellie Mae.

Now Michael and I have never owned mineral rights to any property we've ever bought. If I remember correctly, we didn't even really "own" the lot in Hot Springs because it's part of a National Park. We had a hundred-year-lease or something weird like that. And I don't even know if there has been anything valuable under the property we've owned. But if there's anthracite under this house, it's not mine and someone else already has the right to dig a big old tunnel under it to get it out.

We ended up buying a house on the side of a mountain for two reasons. We couldn't bring ourselves to buy a house that might have subsidence problems. This is a nice way of saying that your house might fall into a hole in the ground because of a mine tunnel underneath it. (Which indeed happened to my dad's childhood home.) And we also didn't want to be in a flood zone. Most all of Wilkes-Barre and the other towns that run alongside the Susquehanna are in a flood zone. After seeing the pictures of Iowa City (and the flooding of two different places where we used to live)I think we made a good choice. We got less house for the money, but I feel a lot more secure when it rains.