What Bruiser thought.

We're returning from our nightly walk. It has been raining and lightly snowing. The walks are on their way to icy. Up the steps:

The Historian: There you go, Bruiser. What'd you think of that?

Today in sandwiches.

Today, I ordered a sandwich that turned out to potentially be in the running for the longest-to-make sandwich in the history of sandwiches. I'm pretty serious that it might have set some kind of record. I don't know who keeps track of these things, but I'd like to submit the following for the Committee's (there has to be a committee, no?) consideration:

LOCATION: Food court, at my place of employ.
TIME: 11:15 a.m.

I walked into the food court. The Mexican place? closed. Chinese place? too much dubious gelatinous biz. (Actually, I didn't even check the Chinese place--I relied on previous intel.) Pizza? looked heat-lamp scorched and otherwise unattractive. That left the cold case (too much empty shelves of nothing), the grill (#deepfatfried), and the sandwich place. So I decided to order a sandwich.

"Is this where you order?" I asked the young counter worker. Wordlessly, she slid a laminated order card and a grease pencil toward me.

I ordered a sandwich with the following specs:

• half
• wheat bread
• toasted
• pesto mayo
• BLT with
• cucumbers and pickles

Also: a bag of barbecue potato chips, in homage to the days when, in junior high, I used to start to salivate like Pavlov's dog in contemplation of the 

• white grease paper wrapped hamburger with 
• pickles on it, which happened to be hot,
• chocolate shake (oh! chocolate shake as a beverage, what halcyon days!), and
• bag of BBQ potato chips,

which remains one of the Platonic ideals of a lunch for me. For everyone, probably, I'm thinking.

Back to my sandwich: and then I paid, and I stood back to wait. Bag of barbecue potato chips in hand. I happened to note a guy who was studying his cell phone with grave intent. He had been waiting since before I stepped up to the ordering place. Why didn't I bring *my* cell phone?

I opened my bag of barbecue potato chips. The sandwich maker seemed to be approaching his work with a certain spaciousness. Spaciness, really. He'd study the laminated order card. Then he'd look up, as if perhaps someone were surveilling him. As, I suppose, in fact I was. Then he'd look down and--I'm not joking--look at the order card again. Maybe he'd put a little scoop of tuna salad on a slice of marble rye. Look up, check out the surveillance team (me, cell phone guy), and put some lettuce and maybe a couple slices of tomato on a small piece of white paper. 

This very leisurely pace of work caused me to reflect. I had not gathered, from the perfectly unbusy sandwich place, that there might have been an unmade sandwich pileup happening. Cell phone guy and me, I thought. But no. After about seven minutes of rather desultory sandwich making, the tuna sandwich was leveled into a plastic container and out of nowhere, another guy slid over to the end of the bar and picked it up. As if he had been waiting elsewhere. Probably in a "While You Wait for Your Sandwich Lounge," available exclusively to an A-List of which I was clearly not a part. Not the cell phone guy, either. 

I thought to myself, I can be calm. I can be patient. Which I was, for three more minutes. Then, I walked over to the counter and said, calm as all hell, "So what's the situation here? How are things coming?" As if, somehow, it would have been rude to say, MAY I HAVE MY SANDWICH PLEASE? 

Well, that would have been rude, surely. The young woman looked at the small row of order cards. She looked back at me. She pointed to the one second to her left (my right), and said, "Yours is next after that one."

I stepped back with the cell phone guy. I leaned up against a pillar and ate some barbecue potato chips like it was my job, or more realistically, like they were my lunch, which, in fact they were, at least until my sandwich came into being.

I watched the guy in the cap--sandwich guy--slap some heaven-knows-what on a slice of bread, then lay that bread on a griddle. Ah, "toasted." Young counterwoman assembled the lettuce-tomato-pickle etc. combo on a small piece of white paper. Another sandwich got made in a very leisurely and squirrelly fashion (to wit: young man performed one sandwich-related operation, looked up, checked out the surveillance, adjusted his cap, resumed the next sandwich-related operation). A few minutes or a half hour later, who could tell when time moves this slowly? the young man placed this sandwich in a plastic container and said, "Cell phone guy?"

Cell phone guy stepped forward and took his sandwich with no air of surprise or drama or sigh of complaint. None whatsoever. It was like this was how things were, and always had been and no doubt always would be, here in Sandwich-ville, the slowest place on earth. I resumed my lean against the pillar and ate some more barbecue potato chips.

It will not surprise you, the people, to know that my barbecue potato chips were long gone by the time my sandwich finally made it into its plastic coffin. "Megastore?" the sandwich guy said.

I stepped forward and he looked up at me with the friendliest smile ever. It became clear: he was a sandwich artist, this was obvious, and not some bread-slapping, pickle-mongering hack, and art cannot be rushed nor robotized. 

"Would you like some broccoli salad?" he asked, politely, pointing to several petite plastic containers.

Reader, I took some broccoli salad, and walked the sandwich back to my office where I ate it with relish, and where it perfumed my work for the rest of the afternoon. I should have taken a picture, but I really couldn't--I was starving, and I had a sandwich to eat. And it was damned good.

Tiny everyday treasure hunt.

Today I was preparing to read, with my students, Muriel Rukeyser's sequence The Book of the Dead, which was based on the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, in which hundreds of miners were sickened and died due to silicosis. As I was preparing, I looked up, to remind myself, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which (you may already know this--I didn't, or had forgotten--) in Egyptian probably meant, literally, something more like the book of emerging forth into the light or book of coming forth by day. This book was composed by many priests over the course of a millennium, and was, in fact, not really a book so much as a series of texts that, over time, comprised a whole funerary tradition, texts and spells taken into the sarcophagus with the dead to guide them on their passage through the underworld.

While I was reading this, scanning and scrolling, I happened upon this fact: the text was written in both hieroglyphic and hieratic script. Hieratic script? I said to myself, because (a) I happened to know the meaning of this word, or at least I thought I did--I used it in a poem once, and at that point I knew what it meant--and (b) I did not know it was a form of writing.

It turns out that--among other things--hieratic writing was generally priestly, and also more cursive than hieroglyphs. To wit:

from Ancient Scripts

The top row is the hieratic--the bottom is the hieroglyphic.

Cursiveness is the degree of joined-ness or connected-ness in the elements of the script. The more connected, the more cursive. Cursive is by definition quicker than print, and hieratic was quicker to write than hieroglyphics, although it's clear that the hieratic signs still referred strongly to the hieroglyphs.

One time I saw an exhibit of Japanese calligraphic works in the Ando Gallery at the Chicago Art Institute. I love this space. I've been there a number of times. It's cool and dark and quiet, ideally anyway--often enough, for a public space like a museum.

The ink strokes on some of the pieces were so thick and bold, there was barely a lightening or lifting of the the brush. The characters connected by joints or tendrils of ink.

I was surprised then, too, to discover that there was such a thing as a cursive style of calligraphic Japanese writing. Similarly, the pages from the books of Persian schoolboys, who practiced their slanting strokes in row upon row, just as I practiced the loops above and below the line on my school girl's paper:

I loved these Persian practice pages so much (I've looked, but can't find the images that I saw back then) that I wrote a poem about then, a poem about cursive writing, a few years ago. I recently took this poem out of my newest manuscript, but now, I'm thinking I'm going to work on it some more. I think it might still have something to say to me--something about writing itself, the ways that these scripts are spells for the journey.

On anger.

I heard a lecture yesterday by a Native American historian. His subject was the colonization of indigenous peoples' land, and the potential decolonization of them. As he ended, he talked about solitude, anger, and patience, using the example of a person waiting at a light in a car, and the impatience that simmers in the waiting.

He contrasted this--I think this is fair to say--with a native attitude of patience and waiting in the moment, without irritation or hurry. He showed a slide, his final slide, of a sunrise, and said that he always ended this way, with an image of the sunrise, because each day, a person could wake to that light, make promises to the day, and that these would be in the form of prayer.

I have been thinking about this ever since. Thinking of how, say, when I am alone, driving, I often give voice to impatient, harsh words, addressed to the drivers around me, or even to myself. Tonight, for instance. I was in the turning lane, turning south. A car in the next lane hastily pulled in front of me, cut across my lane, hurtled across the path of my moving car, to turn left before me. It was a dangerous thing to have done--perhaps not done deliberately, but mindlessly. I followed, turning, soft curses on my tongue. I thought again: quick to wrath.

In my dealings with people present around me, I am not usually quick to wrath. Or if I am, when my temper rises, I almost always apologize, and quickly. I don't like living with lingering anger and its consequences as my companions.

But in my passages from here to there, when I am alone, the angry source of these words are my medium.

I want to not live in haste, in temper, in quick anger.

I like the idea of beginning the day the way the lecturer described, with a promise to the day that is a prayer. I want to wake and have that prayer be my first thought, and be reminded of it during the day.

I wonder how long I would need to practice that kind of steadiness, compassion, patience to have it become my nature. If it ever could.

Also, I wonder if I will ever manage to wake up at sunrise, and that's the truth.

Hurry is an antagonist of this. Not enough sleep, too much worry, too many things to do. But it's also, clearly, a habit, a reaction and not a response.

We draw upon the languages we're given, but also the languages we cultivate. I want to cultivate new languages. This is only one of them, but it seems like a good place to start.

In the middle of the middle.

Week seven of the semester is actually almost half way. Almost. Halfway is such a nice word. Halfway is when you reach minute twenty of a forty minute stint on the treadmill (divisible by five, four, two, ten) (and one). Halfway is when you've done six of your twelve-in-a-row consultations with students. Halfway is, regrettably, when you've eaten your ice cream cone to the point where the ice cream is level with the cone (this is a judgement call, but this is, after all, my blog).

However: halfway also means

• grading all  the revisions, even the ones that haven't yet been drafted
• reading and ranking all the job applications
• planning 80% of the five year program review
• going to an as yet undefined number of curriculum committee meetings
• writing two conference presentations
• finishing several tenure reviews

and so on.

Between now and the end, I will do all of the above--all of it, there's no way round but through--and I will also

• go to Tampa
• go to Minneapolis (and the Walker Art Center, yo!)
• keep teaching my wonderful, unpredictable students, and in the process
• read more poetry, theirs and others'
• watch more light materialize every single day
• see tulips and daffodils bloom in my yard
• watch the rose bushes come into leaf
• catch the lilacs blooming

and maybe I will

• read a few books, God willing,
• write a few poems,
• etc.

I was feeling overwhelmed when I started all this bulleting and right now I feel quite a bit better. That's because I'm just about to 

• go to bed. Which I hope I'll do 
• a lot of in the next seven or eight weeks.

Tiny, five hour fictions.

You can tell yourself you're going to catch up on your grading, because after all, you have five uninterrupted solitary hours at home in the evening.

You can tell yourself that you can also do the laundry whilst catching up on your grading.

You can tell yourself you've got time to do a little light editing of your manuscript. Also, that you can go get it printed and put it in the mail.

You can tell yourself that changing the linens on the bed is a ten minute job. Fifteen, tops.

But you can't make five uninterrupted solitary hours do all that. You just can't, no matter how many stories you tell yourself about "uninterrupted" and "solitary" and even "five."

That is all.

Looking into--for--light.

[click on images to enlarge]

Personal cinematic history: Michael Clayton.

In movies, I like a few things, pretty much without exception:

I love a story about a compromised person who needs, really needs, to do one thing right.

I love a film that has an elegant structure, one that continues to reveal itself for the duration of the film and beyond, in memory.

I love a film that trusts its own aesthetic commitments.

I love a story with words that last and last, words that come to be talismanic for me.

Like all the thinking moviegoers of America in 2007, I saw the trailer for Michael Clayton and I looked forward with great anticipation to the film. And when I saw it the first time, I felt within the first minute that I was in just such a movie: the character, the structure, the aesthetic, the words. The swank law firm in a moral swamp, with no sign of it aside from one senior partner who was cracking up and, in the process, taking their money case to the brink of disaster. The titular fixer is sent to try to salvage the situation. The movie bore out my initial intuition. It seemed perfect to me.

When I saw the movie the second time, in the theater, it was so I could commit to memory the words of Arthur Edens (played by Tom Wilkinson) in the opening monologue:




(That chilly interior, so quiet, juxtaposed with the frantic drive of Edens' epiphany.)

The third time, it was for all the details: Clayton's son and his book, Realm and Conquest, the way the father and the son were with one another. The encounter on the street between Clayton and Edens, whose arms are full of bread: Clayton saying to him, "I'm not the enemy," and Edens replying, "Well then, who are you?"

Lines from this film reverberate for me. Edens saying, "I set that notion aside. I tabled it," for instance, whenever I feel gripped by an idea that I know will not serve, that will derail me from my purpose, that will lead down a path that is unhappy or unproductive. More, though, I try not to make the film a lesson for me. I think about the characters and their dilemmas, the ways that their working in the cogs of a giant system means that their agency can, at any given turn, seem to be chokingly limited and bounded. I think of the stillness and the quiet at points in the film, that seem to be analogues for conscience.

I love a film that gives me this:

and this:

and an image as preternaturally beautiful as this:

I would show it to you, but I can't show it to you. You'll have to see it for yourself, this film that I love, and every little narrative and filmic miracle therein.

The megastore recommends.

still light!

1. Getting home before it's dark. The people, this seems obvious, but sometimes it isn't. I
recommend it. When you leave the gym and it's still light, it makes you feel like you can go to the grocery store and buy food. Arriving home with said food when it's still light makes things like, oh, talking to the people you love, and standing around in the kitchen chopping stuff feel both possible and delightful. Arriving home when it's still light makes the enthusiastic and sniff-you-up way the big waggy dog greets you at the door feel sweet and charming instead of overwhelming.

2. Making dinner, with food. Speaking of chopping stuff: how lovely it is to have dinner at

dinner! with food!

home! Even when it's the same old thing, because it's what people like and it's manageable and--this is key--it's reliably delicious. Chopping red onions and green onions and a half a jalapeño and cilantro and tomatoes feels like a little bit of ordinary wizardry. It's good. It feels like you're living your life instead of your life living you.

like this, but on the
inside.

3. A fleeting feeling of leisure. Oh, how I treasure this. It's not like there aren't a million and one things on the list, and maybe they're even clamoring for my attention. But it's Thursday night. I got home before dark. I bought food, I prepared it, we ate it together and had a conversation at a dinner table. I put the leftovers away. After that, a little note of devil-may-care creeps in--why not take a moment to read the paper, or think a desultory thought? And maybe lie down for a tiny little rest whilst your husband watches a basketball game? Why not?

guacamole technical note.

4. Guacamole. Cut the avocado right in its skin, then scoop it into a bowl. Minced red onion, sliced green onion. Finely chopped jalapeño and cilantro. If you're in the mood, a little chopped tomato. Salt. Do what you feel you need to to make it the texture you like--mash or further cut it with knives in the bowl. Is this not, in fact, a tiny little fiesta, happening right in your kitchen? Well, isn't it?

Paper.

[one]

Princeton recently received an extremely valuable collection of rare books from William Scheide, who had the collection from his grandfather and his father. At the time of his death, the collection included more than 2500 items, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, and many things more wonderful than these. Paul Needham, librarian of the Scheide collection, says

He has dozens and dozens of extremely rare examples of early European printing showing the spread of printing outside the city of Mainz where it was invented to other parts of Europe. Many of those items are unique survivals. He has a very strong collection of significant music manuscripts because he was himself a music historian. He has a strong collection of Bach autographed material and scribal copies of Bach's compositions annotated by Bach, a wonderful sketchbook that Beethoven kept where he wrote down all his musical ideas when he was in Vienna about the year 1815.

What I wouldn't give to be able to see--just see--that Beethoven sketchbook. Or Bach's annotations on those 'scribal copies.'

Audie Cornish asks Needham, in a brief interview yesterday on NPR, to talk about the relation of digitized material, as much of this collection is already or soon will be, to the actual physical objects--'the physical pages,' and he says this:

[two]

Two days in a row, I've received letters from Scotland.

in the post.

The first was from Evie:

Helloe.

Her news was that she had written book that included very intelligent sharks--they can talk and they can understand us--who were planning to go to America and eat the people and make America their own. Luckily for America, the heroine of the book gathered an army and fended them off.

Miriam's letter was perhaps less literary but a little more chatty. She reported that "last night we went to a wedding reception--it was great. I got to dance with baby Jacob! I was a bit dizzy last night as well because I was spinning Oliver." This sounds to me quite as fancy as any ball at a manor house in Jane Austen.

[three]

This wee is 'You've Got Mail' week at my grandson Deacon's school. I wrote him a letter on a card from a set I bought awhile ago, called 'Typographica.' It had an alphabet and numerals in old style typography, like this:

The little letter I wrote will arrive care of his teacher at his school, where he will read and open it. I remember getting letters from my grandmother when I was a child, and my mother wrote letters to me and my little family when I was a young wife and mother. I have some of them, but I know that others of them got lost in a long-ago move. Perhaps for this reason, it is difficult for me to give away anything handwritten, written by hand to me. There it is, that paper that the writer chose, and the writer's handwriting--the patience, or impatience evidenced there, legible or barely so. Even the most ordinary handwritten thing is a treasure and a mystery.

Dear Monday masquerading as Tuesday,

I know, I know--you also signal that the week will be short. That's your CV, your street cred, your bonafides. 

Still: why, Monday masquerading as Tuesday, why so crushed-up and cataclysmic, so last-minute-to-prepare? So it's-all-happening? Monday masquerading as Tuesday, why so hardcore?

Let me just say, I had a long list of stuff I was going to accomplish after getting home just shy of six, and finding that I had nothing to make for dinner, and rushing off to see a grandson's basketball game. Which was so fun! And then eating a dinner we grabbed on the way home. And then Justified. All so fun! And then, whoops, it was ten o'clock and the list was unattended to. The list: derelict and unkempt. It is, in a word, a list untouched. And now, it's time to walk the dog.

Monday masquerading as Tuesday: now is the time for a big s i g h.

Yeah, I know. This is just a performative whine. So I'll leave it, but Monday (masquerading as a Tuesday), I kind of hate how you can make a perfectly beautiful dream of a getaway just pfff! evaporate like, you know, a perfectly beautiful dream.

Monday masquerading as a Tuesday: no one likes a dream-evaporator. No one.

srsly,

htms

The end. (of the road trip.)

This morning, we shot out of bed at 7, and were out the door of the desert house by 8. Well, by 8:20.

The night before, we had done the "how long will it take us to drive back?" calculus, amplified by two amplification factors: (1) the "it always takes longer on the way back" multiplier, and (2) the Pacific-to-Mountain time drag.

Even with these long-assifying factors, we made it back by 8:42 p.m. To our door, where we were greeted by our happy, happy dog and the young man who had kept him company.

Here are important factors about the day's trip:

1. we figured out what that giant light was, just outside of Searchlight.
2. we reminded ourselves why the iPod Classic is classic. Was, I guess. Always will be.
3. we had items we had brought from our desert house stash to restore us: San Pellegrino Melograno Arancias; cookies of the Chessmen variety; crackers, all sorts; oranges, navel. Also! at a grand--seriously, so huge!--AM/PM store outside of Vegas, I got (bought) us two cups with pebble ice. Score/deluxe!
4. the Virgin River Gorge is 90% less thrilling when it is restricted to one northbound lane. Also, and related: 98% more frustrating.
5. The closer to home you get, the more likely you are to be thinking of a (a) to do list; (b) stuff you should have been doing whilst on vacation but (c) did not do. Related: stress rises at a rate inversely proportional to the shortening distance of your journey home. (that's a thing, right?)

Well, we're home. I have put away stuff and done a load of laundry. My workout clothes are packed for tomorrow, and I have sent messages to my students (in lieu of actually having graded their work, but you know. It's something.) It's considerably chillier here than it was in the desert, but tonight while we took Bruiser for a frisky walk, he enjoyed it and so did we. See you tomorrow at work, if I happen to work with you.

Road trip diary, Day 4.

Yesterday's big adventure maybe sort of wiped us out. It took us awhile before we were ready for a plan.

At first, we were going to go drive by this one house in Twenty Nine Palms because it looked sort of fancy and avant-garde in the real estate magazine, and we were pretending that we might buy a house here.

"I think maybe it's just the light that makes the roof looks all those colors," the historian said.

"We could drive by and see," I replied helpfully. "Do you want to?"

"Naah," he said. 

Then we thought about driving into the park for a little jaunt, taking whatsoever hike or nature walk struck our fancy. Then:

Me: Remember when we were driving back on 62 yesterday? did you see that sign for the Big Morongo Canyon?

Historian: YES.

So I Googled it, and that's where we went.

Like so many places--oases--in the desert, this particular place is made of the availability of water (underground lake, subterranean rivers) and vegetation (willows and cottonwoods), which attracts birds galore. There are alleged (I'm not arguing) mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Snakes, of course, and bugs. Anyway, we decided to go take a small hike or two.

It was mid afternoon, and the birds were in audible evidence, but not much in visual display. Here and there, you could hear the trickle and burble of water. A little frog aria. 

We paused when a woman walking in front of us was, as I was, trying to catch the flight of insects in the light. 

bugs. and light.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to rush you," I said.

This led to a conversation about a creature she spotted yesterday--she was so excited that it was hard to understand, exactly, what she was saying. It was a hummingbird--or a moth? a moth hummingbird? No, a striped hummingbird moth. 

"It landed on my phone--it's pink, so it was attracted. I didn't have my camera--" she gestured toward her camera --"so I couldn't capture it. I'm just looking for it, I hope I get to see it again. 

[NOTE: this is someone else's video, just so you can see what this strange creature
looks like.]

We lingered--more light, more bugs--as she moved ahead. A few minutes later, we ran into her again. She had her camera focused on a low bush in front of her. She gestured with energy at the bush. There it was.

I caught one quick shot before it sped off. She showed me hers, zoomed in. A flash of pink on its wings.

There are, allegedly, all sorts of hummingbirds that frequent the Canyon. We didn't see any of them. We saw a fleeting glimpse of this hummingbird moth, a rather large flock of crows gliding over the sky as the sun set, a butterfly. The air was fresh. We climbed up to a ridge to see the willows and cottonwoods, their shapes and colors, and the mountains in the distance. Another place people have taken the trouble to preserve, with its hidden water, its discreet birds, its forking paths.

Road trip diary, day 3.

This morning started with bird song. Lots of it.

little bird with a black speckled bib, singing on the rooftop.

After a nice, slow start, we drove into Joshua Tree. Below is an ocotillo tree. Not a cactus. Deciduous, with these beautiful red flowers and also that perfect blue sky.

Not a cactus.

The historian looks good in an ocotillo patch.

handsome.

(close up. ocotillos are addictive.)

tiny leaves appearing above each thorn.

(also, I apparently can't stop taking pictures of myself in the rear view mirror. vacation hazard, I guess.)

big camera.

We drove from the south exit of Joshua Tree through a crazy canyon down to Mecca, and from there, to the Salton Sea.

I took this picture of the pelicans at the North Shore
Marina and Yacht Club. No yachts in evidence, fyi.

Which was both the same as what I had heard, and different. I didn't realize how much bird life there was. So much!

I had to work to get this tiny yellow flower into focus.
I hope you're happy.

(also, I will never pass up a flower photo opportunity.)

tiny & cute, right?

(or a bird.)

egrets galore at the Salton Sea.

Egret taking off.

But we did finally get to Bombay Beach, which is pretty burnt out.

"abandon all hope ye who enter"

who is this? kind of wolfish, with those
teeth, especially on the boards of
a boarded up house.

And I am not sure what to make of this injunction, either,
posted as it is on a house that's wrecked and abandoned.

There's a sort of an explanation here (and here) for this, but all the explanations in the world can't quite do justice to the state of this town, or how people still live by the Salton Sea.

We kept driving--we drove so far that when we drove back, we had to pass through Border Control (guess what? the historian does not seem like a person who comes from Mexico to the Border Control agent, whoa!). We were aiming for the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Preserve. That's right, Sonny Bono.

This place was amazing. Evidently, the Salton Sea is a major bird highway. There are about 600 species of birds in North America, and about 400 or so of them have been spotted in the Refuge. We walked for a mile or so as the sun set. The birds were flying everywhere.

birds flying in the last light. 

And then we found some enchiladas to eat.

happy valentine's day!

Road trip, day 2.

Through the strangeness that is Vegas,

its weird monuments,

and whatever the hell this is, bright towering light in the full daylight, over what looks like water against the mountains,

and hours later, we arrive and fall into sleep, and wake to this:

the low cooing of doves,

a strange but also familiar door,

and lamplight pooling against the dark.

Posted with Blogsy

Road trip diary.

We left the house 40 minutes later than planned. I had to go back to get the cord that allows us to play  the iPod through the car stereo. Also, I had a peeled orange in hand. Then we went to get air in the tires.

It took us longer than it should have to get past Provo. Traffic, you know, and a late start. The sun slanted in the windows as it tilted down, down, down to the western horizon.

We haven't been on this stretch of the highway for quite some time. We talked and talked about this and that. Work, children. Work. What we'll do tomorrow. 

Did you know that if you don't get back on the freeway at Nephi that you have to go all the way to Levan? and then it's nine miles from Levan back to I-15? In the dark? Well.

We're halfway-ish. I have identified the key elements for tomorrow: the best route to get to where we're going, and where we're having breakfast, and where we will buy provisions for when we get there.

We're on our way to getting where we're going. It's fine with me if it takes just about as long as it takes.