the deep moans round with many voices

Hello!

So since I last posted, I reached the gathering site in Alberta (a very swanky "cabin" in the Canadian Rockies, and I will not be any more specific than that, thank you very much). The get-together was WONDERFUL, which is unsurprising, but alas all good things must end so the vast majority of people left Sunday morning (July 20) in order to fly home (or in one case catch a bus to Banff). I drove northeast to Drumheller, leaving around 11ish, and that was the only day where I had to stop on the side of the road to pee in a ditch because Google Maps decided to route me via county roads through the middle of nowhere so I had no chance to find a gas station.

The Royal Tyrell Museum was EXCELLENT and I highly recommend a visit to anyone who has the chance. If you have the time, arrive in the morning to take a badlands hiking tour (this obviously did not work with my schedule), but the museum itself is still damn cool. I then spent the night in a "hotel" that was 7 rooms above an Indian restaurant. The room was fine! It was just kind of a surprise. But on the bright side, I bought a double order of garlic naan for an evening snack and proceeded to munch on that as car snacks for the next two days.

I also bought a t-shirt, a pair of socks, and a travel mug (no handle, has a tea-and-dinosaurs pun) from the museum gift shop. No regrets!

Monday the 21st I drove back south into the US and then took the Going-To-The-Sun Road from east to west through Glacier National Park. (I had previously acquired an America The Beautiful pass which gets you into ALL national parks, plus any sites managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service, and US Army Corps of Engineers that charge an entrance fee.) Glacier is fucking BEAUTIFUL. Due to time constraints (and also weather; it was gray and drizzly during most of my visit) I didn't do any proper hiking, but I did get to walk upstream along Siyeh Creek for a little way.

I spent Monday night at a motel in Kalispell, west of Glacier, where I was able to wash a load of laundry. And I will post about the rest of my trip another day.

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In non-trip news, I am currently staying at Vicky's house while she is off on her own two-week road trip. She is circling through Chicago, Pittsburgh, NJ, DC, South Carolina, Tennessee, and then Chicago again on her way home to Minnesota. Meanwhile I am dogsitting Alfie, bringing in her mail, and generally making her house look lived-in rather than vacant.

What I get out of this is A) some distance from our parents, which is nice (I love them but it's still fundamentally awkward to live in their basement as a middle-aged adult); B) BETTER INTERNET (my parents' wifi works fine for anything word-based but is frankly tragic about images, gifs, and videos); and C) the company of one of the world's most adorable dogs. <3

In job search news, I have applied to two Not The IRS offices in the Twin Cities area (annoyingly you can't apply for a region -- you have to apply to each office individually). I have also updated my resume and tomorrow I am going to poke at LinkedIn until I can figure out how best to upload it and start refining my job search terms.

Also I may have fallen down a rabbit hole reading Ask A Manager columns, but shhh, we'll keep that as our little secret. ;)

Trip planning is HARD, you know?

I will be leaving on either Sunday or Monday on an approximately 2-week trip. The main point is a gathering of fandom friends in western Alberta, but I have planned my approach so as to have time to do One Thing in Winnipeg (Manitoba) the afternoon of my first travel day, and One Thing in Regina (Saskatchewan) the afternoon of my second travel day. Then the gathering, and on Sunday the 20th I will head to Drumheller to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum.

I THINK I have my itinerary roughed out for the following week.

-Monday 7/21, drive south across the Canada/US border to Glacier National Park, hike an easy trail

-Tuesday 7/22, drive west to Yakima, WA; no stops planned

-Wednesday 7/23, drive to Olympic National Park, hike an easy trail, look for banana slugs, etcetera, then overnight in Forks or Oil City

-Thursday 7/24, drive south on US-101 and stop at some point to get out and dabble my feet in the Pacific Ocean, before heading inland and stopping short of Portland, OR, probably in Beaverton; might also visit Tillamook Creamery if time permits

-Friday 7/25, drive to Boise, ID, possibly stopping at a winery or two along the Columbia River valley (more research needed)

-Saturday 7/26, drive from Boise, ID to Bozeman, MD, skirting the western edge of Yellowstone en route; might stop for photos but more likely will just drive on through

-Sunday 7/27, drive from Bozeman, MD to probably Dickinson, ND, with a stop en route to sightsee in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and hopefully see some bison and/or prairie dogs

-Monday 7/28, head home to the Twin Cities; no stops planned

This feels generally doable to me. None of the driving days are excessively long, none of the activities are excessively strenuous, and I will return home before August. Now I have to research national park admission policies and also start making motel reservations. Argh.

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.

Tonight I have been prepping for my flying (...pun retroactively intended) Thanksgiving visit to Minnesota.

Context: we used to do Thanksgiving at my parents' house in New Jersey. This worked because A) tradition and B) it was halfway between Ithaca and DC. Then Vicky moved to Minnesota, but we still had east coast Thanksgiving because my parents still had the best house. (Also we randomly did Thanksgiving in my apartment twice over the past 15 years, but that was a logistical pain in the neck so it never caught on.) Then our parents finally retired back home to Minnesota, but! Instead of Minnesota Thanksgiving we did a few years of Chicago Thanksgiving because that's where my Aunt C lives and it's drivable from Ithaca in a pinch. (IIRC we had also done Chicago Thanksgiving once previously while Grandma D was still alive but was no longer able to fly -- Aunt C picked her up from Iowa and drove back to Chicago, while Mom and Dad picked me up from Ithaca and we drove west. I don't recall how Vicky got there.)

Anyway, this summer Aunt C retired back home to Minnesota, so now family holidays are in Minnesota and I am traveling by plane because I am not driving 20+ hours for a two-day visit.

The point of this story is that this afternoon it occurred to me that, given the short duration of the visit, I might not need to pack a suitcase -- instead, I could get by with a backpack and a tote bag. This would be preferable since then I would NOT need to planeside check any items and therefore wouldn't need to wait for any such items to be returned on the jet bridge after landing. That is important because I have a RIDICULOUSLY tight connection on my way west Wednesday afternoon/evening, and anything that saves time could be vital.

So far this plan seems to be working out in practice as well as in theory, but we'll see how the final few items fit.

Also the weather in Minnesota is proper wintry so I will be wearing my new winter coat to the airport and stuffing my all-purpose black hoodie into my backpack. Oh! Which reminds me that I must remember to bring my scarf and some gloves. Yes. I will go add them to my packing list.

Also, a belated catch-up life update post:

1. My colonoscopy went pretty smoothly, aside from the part where it took two nurses three tries to insert the IV into my arm, what even. The doctor found only one polyp, but it was pre-cancerous and it was weirdly large for a single polyp in a person of my age, so they want me to get a follow-up in 3 years instead of 5. Which is more or less what I was expecting -- didn't really think I'd have actual cancer, but did expect some pre-cancerous nonsense due to family history, which is why I wanted the colonoscopy in the first place -- so I think that's as good a result as could be expected.

The laxative prep medication, on the other hand, was absolutely godawful. I literally could not drink more than one or two swallows at a time without tripping my gag reflex and needing to wash it down with either juice or chicken broth. UGH.

2. The Cape Cod trip was AMAZING. It was really great to meet a bunch of NFE folks in person, not to mention swimming in the bay and playing Cards Against Narnia and Narniopoly late into the nights. I got diverted en route to pick up be_themoon from Logan airport due to flight delays (there was some kind of travel curse that hit multiple people), but otherwise I personally had a pretty smooth drive both to and from.

3. I have a mammogram scheduled for Wednesday morning, which is cool; I have a dentist appointment scheduled for next week, which is also cool; and yesterday I got an email saying that I have an appointment with my GP on Thursday morning, which was news to me! So I need to call her office and A) figure out WTF that's about, and B) reschedule, because that's a work day.

4. Had a Zoom call with Cat and Susan on Friday evening -- always good to see them and catch up!

5. I splurged and bought season tickets to NYS Baroque, the Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble, and the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, because what is even the point of finally having disposable income if I don't spend some of it on nice things? (I mean, I also give a bunch to miscellaneous charities and stuff, but one cannot live on virtue alone.)

I think that's the highlights.