So, we’re in Florida now at Blake’s friend’s house where we spent the night.
We left our house at about 8:30pm Saturday night and got here to Noelle’s about…10 or 10:30pm last night, I think. We stayed up until maybe 12:30am or 1am talking on Noelle’s patio and then I took Xanax for the very first time, just 1/3 of a pill and I was like…this isn’t doing anything, and then…that shit gives you a 2 minute warning before you are going to pass your ass out! Holy Hannah! And I have a drug tolerance that would put Keith Richards to shame too, wtf!? And people take this recreationally? Why? How is passing out “recreation”? Was I supposed to get high off of it and just didn’t? Hmmm. Maybe I should have taken the whole pill…
…maybe then I wouldn’t haave been woken up at 7am by this ferocious beast of Florida:
His name is Greg and I would guess he’s about 7 or 8 months old. He’s teething and he woke me up by jumping in front of me (I was laying on my side) and claiming my right thumb as his own personal teething ring. He chews and sucks, it’s so weird.
This is his sister, Mary Anne:
When I got up, I came out to the patio because everyone’s still sleeping but me and Wes, so the whole house is quiet and dark and I thought my typing would wake people up. Plus, if I’m out here I can quietly listen to music. It’s so weird to be sitting OUTSIDE in just a t-shirt and hoodie in MARCH. My brain is having a hard time processing this, like I keep forgetting that it’s March because it feels like June.
The drive was interesting…not really. I thought it was interesting that you’d see a billboard for a titty bar one minute and another asking who Jesus is the next. Blake said, “welcome to the bible belt”.
I think driving through West Virginia was the best part of the drive. I’d never seen mountains before, neither had the kids. The Appalachians aren’t all that impressive by mountain standards, at least not where we were, but they’re the biggest we’ve ever seen and all the trees on the mountains were bare and I think that was prettier than if the trees had had leaves on them because then you could see where the mountain stopped and the trees started. There was a shocking lack of snow though, for mountains. Or at least I figured there would be more. There were like, little rivets of ice coming from the giant wall of rock along the sides of the road, that I know as “Canadian Shield”because we have it up North, but I’m sure it’s called something else down here.
I wasn’t sold on the idea of leaving our house at night but I think that was the best way to do it because, as my mom had pointed out, we’d be in the dark or sleeping through the boring stuff (NY/PA) that I’ve either already seen or looks just the same as home. I didn’t really sleep on the way here though. I dozed off for about 2 hours in the middle of the night but mostly I just listened to Blake’s podcasts and got caught up on the Walking Dead comics because Blake put them on the iPad for me so I could read them in the dark. SMART THINKIN’, EH? On the way back we’re spreading the drive over 2 days and staying at a hotel in between somewhere so we’re not driving in the dark so I don’t think I’ll try putting a book on the iPad would be necessary.
Speaking of books, I brought with me: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, The Wasp Factor by Iain Banks and The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice. I’ve read The Wasp Factory before but I forget what it’s about exactly. All I remember was that I really liked it (I read it a long time ago when a friend from the Stile Project Forum sent me a copy) and for some reason I think it might be something Madison might be interested in. The Neil Gaiman book is young adult fiction which normally I have negative interest in but so many people I know loved this book and it’s short, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve never read anything else by Neil Gaiman, but he’s a very nice man on Twitter. I tried really hard to read the first Sandman trade and couldn’t get into it, which I KNOW is like blasphemy to some people, but hey, it’s the truth.
————————————————–LATER——————————————————
Blake and Madison woke up while I was typing this and as it turned out, Blake had forgotten the power cord for his CPAP machine and slept like shit last night so he started googling for a company here that sells them to see if we could buy another cord. He found a place 30 minutes away so we were like, “yay!” but they didn’t have any cords. They could order us one but that wouldn’t help us out any for now. The guy on the phone said that he could find a cord with the right end at Radio Shack and there happened to be one of those in the town we’re in too, which was right beside a grocery store.
We went to the Radio Shack and Blake got his cord and then we went to the grocery store to find breakfast food. Something about the US that’s always bugged me is that in the US, there are TONS and TONS of junky cereals, whereas in Canada, there are probably more healthy cereals than junky ones. I mean we have the usual suspects, Corn Pops, Fruit Loops, Cap’n Crunch, Lucky Charms, Trix and a couple of others but mostly it’s various incarnations of Cheerios, various incarnations of Shreddies, Honeycomb and Alphabits which is the junkiest cereal I was allowed to eat when I was a kid…anyway, Wes got Cookie Crisp and I got Crunch Berries. Oh and Madison got Fruity Pebbles, all of which we cannot get at home. We also got milk and bagels. I looked in the pop aisle for pineapple Fanta and they had some but it was 2L bottles and we’re only going to be here for another few hours so I’ll try and find some when we get to Blake’s mom’s house on the other side of the state.
Noelle just woke up and said that we are going to go to some lake somewhere where there’s a little town to buy stuff and then we’re going to apparently show the kids the ocean. Then at about 4pm, we’re going to start making our way West to the other coast where Blake’s mom lives. Blake says we should be there by dinner, I remain skeptical.
Anyway, I better shut this down and participate in the day.