5.19.01

ah, i am just barely resurfacing amid a tower of boxes and suitcases. the road trip from san fran to boise wasn’t as traumatic as i’d expected; after a half hour of frantic meowing, zeke settled down into a pretty decent car cat. some of the trip’s highlights:

-the middle of nevada, somewhere between winnemucca and the oregon border, is the most desolate high-desert country you’ll find. wide open plains dotted with sage brush and tumble weed and cheet grass for a hundred miles in any direction, running up against dusty purple mountains on the horizon. from the freeway, i noticed an old corrugated-metal trailer parked amongst the weeds. it had a hand-painted sign that said “free parking”. perhaps that’s only funny if you’ve just come from the bay area.

-my father asked to borrow a couple of CDs for the trip, since he was driving the other car. i handed him my CD wallet. his selections: the indigo girls, pink floyd and tori amos. keep in mind that this is a man who votes republican for environmental reasons (shudder), thinks lit crit is “hooey” and used to force me to listen to Patsy Cline when we’d go fly fishing in the backwoods of idaho. i can only guess that he didn’t know what he was getting himself in to.

-one last Freak of the Week for my last day in san francisco: my mother dropped me and a few boxes off at the greyhound station so that i could ship them. i told her to hover in the taxi-only parking lane, and to go around the block if she needed to. apparently, while i was inside, this man came up to the car wearing a bicycle tire stretched around his chest, over his arms so that he could only lift them below the elbow, and started screaming “hey lady, this is a taxi-only stand! get the fuck out of the way!” and other such charming things. i guess he was so persistent that my mother began screaming ugly things back at him, and by the time i got back to the car, she had been forced to move it out of fear that he was actually going to attack the car. hehe, it seems my mother had her fill of sf in a very short period of time.

so now i’m back in idaho, and the reality that i’m going to be here for the next five months is starting to sink in. i miss california already, but this is a nice way to vacation. idaho is beautiful in the summer, and life here is just so much easier. well, with the exception of this household. we now have two cats, a bird and a dog in the house, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider the logistics: the younger cat, zeke, wants to eat the bird, but the elder cat, midnight, does not because once the bird cage fell on him and he has been afraid of it ever since. midnight has FIV (feline version of HIV, which is rampant in outdoor housecats), which he could communicate to zeke if they were ever to get in a brawl. serra, the golden retriever, wants to eat both cats. zeke wants to eat the golden retriever. so at this point, we have to keep midnight away from zeke but not the dog or the bird, serra away from zeke and midnight but not the bird, and zeke away from everyone. this will not be a simple task.

went to see my friend stephanie get married yesterday. she married this wonderful british chap named simon, and all the american groomsman had begun acquiring british accents by the end of the party. the wedding was pretty much picture-perfect, and the reception was held in the boise depot, which is this classy old train station up on a hill with a fabulous view of the boise front (the mountains that wrap around the north-west side of the valley). there were lots of people i haven’t seen since high school there, so the party took on a sort of high school reunion feel to it. did you know that it’s environmentally unsound to throw rice at weddings now? apparently the birds eat the rice and then it swells up in their tummies and can kill them. so the proper choices are birdseed or bubbles. we blew lots of soap bubbles into the wind whilst stephanie and simon ran out the steps of the church and were whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage.

i have the house to myself tonight. so what am i planning? i’m going to blockbuster to rent the last four tapes of the BBC pride and prejudice, since i only managed to see the first two at carolyn’s pride and prejudice party last week. pride and prejudice happen to be the names of the breasts of a friend of mine, who probably prefers that i not name her. mine are named sense and sensibility. the left one is sense and the right is sensibility. i’d like to blame alcohol for this, but i think that would be a lie.