At long last we’ve reached Portland! I drove the last two hours yesterday evening, with Mr. Garter stoically not throwing up in the passenger seat. The cat was draped over his lap, purring like a maniac and being generally more adorable than anyone has a right to be. Wouldn’t you know the little beastie would finally get comfortable in the car in the final hours of the trip?

Now we’re camped out in our new digs, the apartment on the other side of Mr. Garter’s parents’ garage, previously occupied by his grandmother. It’s nicely, if grandmotherily, furnished, which actually makes it feel a little weird to move our stuff in. Not that there’s much moving in of stuff just yet: the boxes we sent with the movers haven’t arrived yet, so all we have is what we brought in the car and a lot of boxes of books we mailed out. I’m feeling anxious without all my yarn around me, and I keep imagining horrible scenarios in which it’s lost or damaged or attacked by a plague of moths in transit. But I’m trying to comfort myself by scouting out potential homes for the stash once it arrives. And the possibilities are legion: all kinds of cubbies and shelves, an enormous wardrobe with nothing in it but some old photographs, more bathroom drawers than we could ever fill with bathroom stuff… and the television doesn’t work, so we can get rid of it and put a lot of yarn in its cabinet.

I hate the disarray of moving, of not being able to put my hands on things I need, like a fork or a water glass or my size 1 Addi circs. I’m far from being a tidy person and I don’t think I’ll ever achieve my grandmother’s maxim of “a place for everything and everything in its place”, but there you have it. And since this landing pad is a very temporary home until we find our own apartment or Mr. Garter’s parents sell the house (whichever happens first), I know we’re never going to be really settled here, and that gives me a sort of rootless feeling I dislike. Call me a homebody, but I wish I could just fast forward to the part where we buy (or build) a house we’re never going to move out of. It’s frustrating to know that’s at least ten years down the line, if it ever happens at all.

So I’m fleeing the chaos and beating a hasty retreat up to my childhood home tomorrow. Really I’m going for the wedding of two of my oldest friends, which is sure to be a great time, but I also just need the opportunity to unwind after our eventful drive. When I come back after the weekend there will be pictures (although Mr. Garter accidentally deleted all the ones we took en route – poo!) and blog revivification and all manner of good things. It’ll be shiny. In the mean time, pray that my yarn (and with it my sanity) arrives intact and unsullied.

Thank you all for your kind wishes – I wish I had time for personal responses right now. The face is doing pretty well: the swelling is down a lot and it doesn’t hurt anymore, and the stitches are supposed to come out the day after tomorrow. I bought a hat with a large brim to keep the sun off it while I was standing along the marathon route yesterday.

As for the reduction in adventures, I hardly know what to write, but I have more bad news. The marathon went very well, and the athlete Mr. Garter was guiding recorded a personal best. Mr. Garter was able to run the whole thing despite his lack of training and he felt terrific afterward. But then last night he got clobbered with what we hope is food poisoning and not an especially virulent stomach flu that’s been going around L.A. The poor guy is feeling perfectly miserable, so we are holed up at his uncle’s place for an extra day instead of being halfway to San Francisco right now.

That means extra knitting time for me, though, so I’m casting on my Hourglass sweater sleeves. My plan is to grit my teeth against the unhappy memories of two socks on two circs and work them both at once. I want to be able to wear this sweater before the weather gets too warm. I also finished my lace leaf scarf at last – hurrah! It had its debut at the marathon yesterday, as L.A. is colder than you’d think. Our hotel room was an icebox and it was quite chilly outdoors before the sun was high enough to clear the downtown skyscrapers.

That’s all for now – send my poor husband your best wishes for a speedy return to health!

At last I’m cozied up to a computer with an internet connection and the time to report on the road trip thus far. We’re in Phoenix for the day and hoping the next few days of the trip will be a little less eventful than the last.

All began well, and we traveled smoothly through Baltimore, rural Virginia, Chapel Hill, Little Rock, and Austin with wonderful visits to friends and relations along the way. The trip has been all about pairs of babies: we helped train a team of baby oxen on my cousin’s farm, lent an extra two pairs of hands to entertaining another cousin’s “two under two”, and got to meet my college roommate’s two adorable little girls for the first time. And the driving has been splendid – there’s a lot less traffic when the cities are farther apart, and the landscapes are beautiful. The prettiest parts of the drive so far were the Great Smoky Mountains, where there’s new growth on the trees and the redbuds are blooming, and the West Texas/New Mexico/Arizona stretch we did yesterday. The only downside has been the cat: now we know he hates road trips. He peed all over his bed and my pillow on Day 2, and on Day 3 he saw fit to barf up a piece of plastic and the only food he’d eaten in 36 hours between my feet. When he wasn’t relieving himself of bodily fluids, he was running around the car with his eyes bugging out of his head, panting in distress and yowling mournfully. I tried to give him a quarter tablet of Dramamine to take the edge off; he bit me and still managed to spit the pill across the car. Then he frothed at the mouth and drooled all over the place for fifteen minutes. It took both of us gripping him and clamping his little jaws shut to get that pill down, and then it didn’t even work. We didn’t have a relatively calm day from him until Day 5. He seems to be getting the hang of it now, and it’s certainly about time.

And now we come to the real adventures, thankfully not feline related. We stopped in Alpine, Texas to visit Mr. Garter’s sister and her fiance, and they showed us a good time. Our day with them began with a trip to the shooting range. Here I must disclose that I am a pacifist animal-loving vegetarian, and I have never handled a gun, nor desired to do so. But when in Texas… Off we went to the range with a .22 pistol, a glock, a .40 hand gun, and a high-powered .17 rifle. There were six or seven other guns we could have taken, but I was assured that these were “the most fun”. Well, guns make me a little nervous, and I nearly lost a thumbnail to the kick of the glock, but it turns out I’m deadly accurate with the .17. I don’t think it really counts because you set the gun up on a pile of blankets on a funny little concrete table and all you have to do is line up the cross hairs and squeeze the trigger, but everyone was very impressed.

Later that afternoon Mr. Garter’s sister took me out on horseback. She has a couple of nice mares she’s done a great job training and she was kind enough to entrust me with the black one, so out we went along the railroad tracks. I’ve never really ridden in a Western saddle and it took me some time to get the feel of it. I managed to get in synch with the horse pretty well, but the stirrup positioned my foot in such a way that there was a lot of strain on my knee and ankle. And that’s what led to the accident. We finished our ride and walked back up to the corrals and tack shed. I should have known better since I was perfectly aware that my ankle was feeling pretty funky, but I jumped off the horse as I normally would, and of course the ankle rolled right over. I got that dizzying wash of pain, and I managed to hop over and loosen my horse’s girth, but the next thing I knew I was lying on the sharp gravel road with a lot of dirt in my mouth and eye and blood pouring from my face. Fortunately, Mr. Garter’s sister has a lot of medical training, and she took charge and patched me up enough to get to the ER in Odessa, two hours away. There was a lot of waiting around and then some thoroughly unpleasant action with a lidocaine syringe, a plastic curry comb, and some surgical wash. But I was lucky to be there on a quiet night and my surgeon really took her time to do the job right. She was a calm, gentle, older black woman with a soothing voice and I liked her in spite of the needle and the curry comb. She put 17 stitches into my chin and upper lip and the corner of my mouth, and by 3 a.m. we were all home again.

So I look like an escapee from a freak show, but at least I didn’t break my nose or put my eyeball out. And since I was unconscious when I fell I didn’t use my hands to try to save myself, so although my knuckles are grazed my hands are totally fine. I can still knit, and that’s what matters. I’d already worked my Hourglass Sweater up to the armholes before the accident, and then I cast on a Jaywalker sock yesterday in the car when I needed something to take my mind off my face. No pictures until we can get to Portland and load the photos to the computer, but at least you can all be thankful you don’t have to see how I look just now. Tomorrow it’s on to L.A. and we kick into gear for Mr. Garter to run the L.A. marathon. And I’ll probably make the baby daughter of another cousin cry when she sees me. Maybe I should knit myself a sort of veil to wear across the lower half of my face. But it’s too warm here for wool. Send cotton yarn and a bucket of Ibuprofen! Portland will probably be my next chance to write, unless the hotel in L.A. has computers I can use. Wish us luck as we turn northward at last – I seem to need it on this trip!

We hit the road tomorrow morning. I’ll be able to manage a few posts along the way, but no pictures for the next few weeks. Au revoir, my New York friends, and may the “revoir” come soon! I’ll leave you with a particularly apt quote from one of my favorite books:

At last one little spider took time enough to stop and talk to Wilbur before making its balloon.

“We’re leaving here on the warm updraft. This is our moment for setting forth. We are aeronauts and we are going out into the world to make webs for ourselves.”

– E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web