Yesterday, Joy & Ella and I stayed at Ron’s all day. I knitted Brett a dark-grey-almost-black hat for this weekend (Telluride will be, like, five degrees at night… and we’ll be camping like total hippy freaks) and read Ender’s Shadow from cover to cover. Joy and Ella baked a cake and Joy made dinner, we all spent some time in the hot tub (Ella went twice), and I did some housekeeping and laundry.

Today I slept until ten because I was up ’til 2:30 finishing Ender’s Shadow. (Yum.) After I got up and clean and dressed, we three girls loaded into the Jeep and drove to Boulder to meet the guys for lunch. We went to a pub and everyone had burgers; I of course had a Gardenburger.

After foodies, the guys went back to work and we girls did a little shopping on the ped mall; I got two more O.S.C. books in the Ender’s universe at Boulder Book Store and some lip shit from The Body Shop, and then we said our goodbyes at the jobsite and drove on to our main goal: Boulder’s local yarn store, Shuttles, Spindels, & Skeins.

It was so wonderful! The place was huge and packed with so much great yarn. I bought a set of needles and some yarn, and tomorrow I’m gonna make myself a warm hat in a brown/garnet colorway for Telluride.

We were planning on going after that to a giant Salvation Army-style thrift store that Joy had heard about, but we were tired and Ella was at the end of her stamina, so we drove home. We passed the guys’ trucks at a bar along Hwy 72.

Ella fell asleep on our drive back to Ron’s, and woke up with a horrible earache like I used to get when I was little. Joy thinks it might be because she wasn’t awake to talk and move her jaw around I went to look it up to explain to her why her ear was aching, and this is why my ears hurt all the damn time and I can’t hear anything driving up and down the mountain: some lovely issue with a little tube in my ear keeps my ears from popping properly. I have always had a hard time in unpressurized plane cabins and driving up or down mountains; I guess I used to cry constantly when my folks drove me over passes. Poor Ella’s been crying almost constantly since we got home, except for when I asked her to ‘doctor’ my knee (I scraped it superficially tripping in the driveway while chasing after our rotten pack of dogs) and when we were explaining how air pressure differences were making her ear drum hurt. Joy called the guys and asked them to grab some asprin on the way home and it sounds like they just pulled in. It’s 6:59… and they’ve been off work since 3:30. Heh.

I’m off to help comfort Miss Ella now that her poppy’s home with aspirins. Ciao!
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Brett has some crazy idea about leaving tonight… tomorrow morning, actually… “around two or so.”

“Two? Or so?”

“Yeah.”

“In the morning?!”

“Yeah. Gotta get through Nebraska while it’s dark out, you know.”

Two in the morning?! Jeez!

But I guess it will put us there on Saturday afternoon, a nice time to arrive. I guess. But shit, even guys who go fishing don’t leave ’til like four or five, right?

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I just spent two hours at the car wash cleaning the Jeep. And I didn’t even wash it.

I put money in the vaccuum four times. I bought one of those Armorall sponge packets and a chamois and cleaned the absolute hell out of the dash and console.

You can hardly tell. It’s depressing. The Jeep has an entirely beige interior, so the difference between dirty and clean isn’t much.

Once I’m done with this post, I’m going out to wash the windows. The inside of the windows. Hopefully I can get Brett to wash the outsides, now that we have an outside faucet and a hose.

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Instead of packing, I spent the morning slapping together a rather half-assed set of pages for Grand Orleans Hotel. I’ve been waiting for weeks and weeks for this client to send me content, and of course he finally sent some yesterday!

I told him I’m leaving for two weeks and probably won’t be able to work on it (it depends on if I can find a PC with a DSL or not) and that I’d get something up in the meanwhile. Hopefully it will satisfy.

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I still need to fold laundry, pack, wash the retrievers (they smell so bad), make the bed, do the dishes, bring in those three rugs that have been on the laundry line for most of two weeks, remember phone and PDA and GameBoy chargers, find CDs, buy fuses, remember water, tell Joe how much to feed the cat, find dog leashes (and ideally collars with tags on them), get Brett to organize the tools he’s taking, and load the Jeep. And bathe. And shave my armpits for heaven’s sake.

And it’s six already!

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Not so bad, really, considering that we’re not leaving for eight more hours!

…except that I’ll probably have to sleep for six of them to be able to wake up at two. Snort!