Prepoceros

We’re within twenty-fours hours of our California trip, so it’s that time when every thing you do revolves around getting ready for vacation. Did I remember to pack my swimsuit? Will I need a sweater? What earrings go with this top? Will my prescriptions be refilled in time? Will anything in the apartment rot and/or explode if it’s left alone for two weeks? Do my parents have enough of the kind of rawhide that Sam likes? And so on.

It took John just over an hour to pack. Me? I’m glad I managed to pick out fourteen days’ worth of clothes and only need six pairs of shoes.* Can I get by with just one purse? I was going to go with the medium black one because (a) it’s black, (b) it has pockets, and (c) it can be zipped closed, but one of my outfits is REALLY brown, so maybe I’ll bring the small not-black purse, too. Don’t even get me started on belts.

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How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

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It flew by this year. John and I spent two nights at a friend’s place in Austin and took a day trip to Enchanted Rock nearby. Big granite formation, fun to clamber up. We had to wait forty-five minutes to get into the park, but it was worth it.

Yesterday we were all over town running errands and visiting people. I picked up my old bike from my parents’ house and, wonder of wonders, it needs only cosmetic repairs after sitting unused in the garage for nearly a decade. I’m looking forward to riding it on short errands and around the trails by the bayou.

The weather has been lovely and spring-ish this week. Seventy degrees, crisp clean air, sunshine, yum yum. If I could wear a tank top and a swingy skirt every day of my life, I would.

But alas, school starts again tomorrow, and while I’ve been enjoying the outdoors my homework has piled up undone. Back to work.

Ah, sweet humidity. You don’t know how much you miss it until it’s gone, gone, gone, leaving you with nosebleeds, chapped lips, flat hair, and painfully congested sinuses. The last four nights of the trip John and I slept in a room without a humidifier, and my congestion got worse and worse. The very last night I started a pot of water boiling and set it next to the bed, in the hopes that my stuffy head would clear up enough to let me get some sleep.

I saw many women in Colorado with normal-looking hair, and I wish I knew their secret. From the day we arrived, my hair stuck to my head in flat, limp sheets. I could’ve sworn half of it had plum fallen out, it was so thin. I washed it, I really did! But to no avail. The night we got home it plumped back up to its normal thin-side-of-average texture with no effort on my part. TV tries to tell me that humidity is hair’s archnemesis, but mine seems to thrive in it.

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Vacation’s been fun, but I’m ready to get back to warmer climes. As fun as it is to pile on four layers of clothes to get to the grocery store, it’ll be nice to prepare myself for the brutal mid-winter weather by maybe throwing on a light jacket.

We’re flying out tomorrow behind that giant storm that’s on its way from California, so I’m glad there’s lots of football* on tonight that I can watch to keep myself distracted. The biggest challenge will probably be getting from up in the mountains, where all the weather is, to Denver, where the daily high is usually above freezing.

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Yesterday the snow came down solidly all day, but we still went up for a half-day of skiing to take advantage of the relatively balmy (i.e., positive) temperatures. Although visibility was low, I managed to stay comfortably warm by wearing every article of ski clothing I own. My fingers were still cold, but when I took my gloves off for lunch my nails were slightly less purple than they’d been the day before, so that was nice.

Today EVERYBODY is taking the day off, except for a few hardy souls we saw trudging up to the mountain. A cold front blew through last night along with four inches of snow, and now the temperature is minus one degree (again, Fahrenheit) in the village. On top of the mountain it’s minus five, with a wind chill of minus thirty-one. MINUS THIRTY-ONE.

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So we’re here, and it’s cold. The plane did not go down in a ball of flames, fortunately. In fact, the flight was rather pleasant. My personal experience of the flight was still horrible, of course, but not because of anything outside my little head.

Here in Keystone it is very, very cold. Not only is the temperature below freezing, it’s not supposed to even approach freezing until approximately March. How people live in climates like this for more than a week at a time is beyond me.

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I didn’t know a locksmith could make a key just by looking at the tumblers in a lock. I learned this interesting fact after my car key disappeared into the Raging River at Schlitterbahn* (it fell out of John’s velcro-ed pocket somewhere along the 45-minute ride). At the end of the day we called the locksmith, and an hour and 75 dollars later, I had two new keys to my car, inferior to the original key only in their lack of nice plastic heads and the ability to unlock the trunk. I also learned that the locks on my car are just for decoration and serve no practical purpose. It’s nice that no one has been seriously inclined** to steal my old newspapers, broken pencils, or radio.

I also didn’t know that asphalt takes less than a day to set. The parking lot in front of my apartment complex was repaved yesterday morning, and when I got home last night it was open again, cars parked on it and everything.

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Man, that was a great vacation. There’s too much to tell here, especially in my current state of exhaustion, in which I’ll be fortunate if I’m coherent enough to spell all the words right in these few sentences.

Driving home from vacation is usually a bit sad, especially when you can feel your week of fun outdoorsy bondy time dissolving into a semester of school and work and chores and commitments.

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The drive took a couple days, so yesterday was our first full day in the condo. The weather here is GORGEOUS. Oh-em-gee, you guys. When we got in on Sunday afternoon the inside of the condo was warmish. The thermostat was set at 60, but it clearly wasn’t running, and we couldn’t find an on/off switch. John called the front desk to ask where the A/C controls were, only to find out that the building doesn’t HAVE air conditioning. We’d never even considered the possibility that you could build a modern building and only put in a heater, but I guess when the average high in August is 71, you can bear a couple warm days here and there.

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