The Rest of the Story

This is one tall Texan, the late great Sam Houston, who lived in Huntsville. Heaven knows why; you can drink the air, this time of year.



I promised to share with y’all the rest of the choir camp saga. It’s been a week. I think I can tell it without getting mad and sad all over again.

Last Tuesday’s class for work was interesting, potentially useful, and dismissed an hour and a half ahead of schedule. [Woohoos! all around.] I limped out to the car ~ weariness, not injury ~ and hit the Tollway and was barreling down I-45 toward Houston while some of my coworkers were finishing their coffee breaks.

At 4:00 I was sitting in the Taco Cabana in Ennis, having turned up my nose at another restaurant which reeked of cigar smoke. [They will be hearing from me via email.] And at 7:30 I was knitting in my room in Huntsville, listening to another guest rev his Harley for multiple short jaunts in the next hour and a half. And some guy talking profanely and laughing loudly at who-knows-what. If I had been home, I’d have popped my head out the door and asked them to tone it down. In a strange city? Not so much.

I think I was finally asleep by 9:30, which meant that I woke at 2:30 for some reading and more knitting. I knitted and napped and read until it was time to take my morning meds, and then I went out for breakfast. I had the banana-stuffed French toast at IHOP, with extra bananas sliced on top, and I wasn’t hungry again until mid-afternoon. [The eggs and bacon and hash browns might have had a little to do with that, you think?]

Back to my room until it was time to head over to the college for the concert. I got a call from LittleBit a little after 11:00, telling me to hurry because the seats were filling fast. I checked out and drove over and spent 15 minutes finding a parking space and another 10 navigating the building that houses the auditorium. I was seated about five minutes to noon, and there was hardly anybody there. People had been ambling out of the building as I walked in, but I didn’t think anything of it, because the camp manual I’d printed off when I registered her said the concert started at noon.

It had started at 11:00. The packet *she’d* been given when I dropped her off showed the concert at 11:00. After shelling out $300 for registration and the music packet, after two 400-mile round-trips in four days, after paying for the gas and my motel room and road food, there was no cherry on my sundae. She came and found me, and I fought tears until I could walk up the stairs and up the hill to the parking garage.

This is LittleBit and her new friend Two, so named by LittleBit during a musical-chairs game one evening when they had to count off.



After we checked her out of the dorm, we headed south of town to the Sam Houston statues. We took lots of pictures, some of which prove that we are both really only four years old. They’ll be in her senior scrapbook, and some you see here.



You can pick your friends ... and you can pick Sam Houston's nose. This is another statue in the park south of Huntsville.

We pulled over at the DQ in Centerville for Blizzards. Lots of men in uniform there: a couple of local cops, and a truly fine state trooper who could be Matthew McConaughey’s older brother. One of the attorneys in my office shares my “thing” for men in uniform. I called and left her a voicemail when we were safely out of earshot in the car, to the effect that I was having a “frisk me, Officer Burley” moment, and she should be jealous.

I was more than a little concerned at not making the concert, because it is the second event this month that I’ve paid good money for and missed. I didn’t know if it was stress, or a senior moment, or an indication of serious neurological potholes ahead. So I was somewhat relieved on Friday morning to find the PDF of the camp manual, and to see “concert at 12:00”, and to know that I hadn’t just imagined it.

LittleBit ended up having a good time and learning a lot and making some new friends, but I don’t think either of us thinks the experience was worth the price that we paid.

To end this post on a happier note, last night was Knit Night with my Sisters of the Wool, and I gave my copy of the Spring IK to one of our ladies. Did I post about that earlier? I sent in a subscription slip, and they back-issued me. I’d already browsed the issue at the bookstore, and unlike the Fall issue which enchanted me, this one did nothing for me. [Imagine!] So I cancelled the subscription and will just pick up the copies as they come out and as they appeal to me.

Oh, and yesterday I finished writing the Great American Novel, also known as the twelve-page questionnaire for my consultation in August with the sleep study doctor. It was really hard to think searchingly about something that ought to be automatic, and there were so many questions that I had to answer “I don’t know”, because nobody shares the bed with me.

I’m certainly not about to invite the children’s father back for a sound check!

A few weeks back I posted photos of Fourthborn's art dolls. This is the one ~ Middlest's ~ that got three of my girls interested in collecting them. His name is Ro, and these are his sheep. He now has a little brother, but I can't find the pictures she sent me.