Keeping It Cool

Welp, the Universe seems to have solved that problem for us! From late Thursday night until late this afternoon, we had no "real" television programming, and as of yesterday in the middle of a Very Important Work Project, we had no internet access either. Awesome! Woot! Down with technology! Down with The Man!

Oh, excuse me, that must have been the withdrawal speaking. For verily it was not awesome, and yea, many tears were shed and garments rent.

I filled my days with Wombat listening to music and/or endangering his life (I let him wave around Linus's favorite toy; I stepped out of the room just long enough for him to roll off the bed and onto [a pillow before he rolled onto] the floor [phew]); and I filled evenings with Simon...watching the handful of channels we still had that weren't pay-per-view, meaning the same ten infomercials (RIP, Billy Mays) and a vast array of low-production, big-time-horrifying churchy stuff. (We had a handful of things saved on the DVR too, and nothing better illustrates the desperate state of affairs than the fact that rather than turn off the t.v. and do something with my life, I resorted to watching portions of the Tori Spelling reality show that had accidentally recorded in place of Tyra. Sad on so many accounts. Like a sparkly diamond whose many facets reflect not a rainbow of light but a rainbow of my patheticity.) (What? It's in the (or on the?) Urban Dictionary.)

But all was not lost! After pulling a full workday on Saturday (because, after a decade in the publishing industry, I still can't accurately estimate how long it will take me to index a 200-page book (note to self: FOREVER. It will take you FOREVER)), we spent all of Sunday in wine country, primarily to attend the first birthday party of one little Miss Nora Lea, and secondarily to be anywhere but trapped in our sweltering house without the cooling comfort of HD programming.

Despite it being hotter up north than in our house (was it really 106 degrees?), we were in good company, and there were homemade fried chicken wings, and who am I to turn down a chance to wrap my arms around a dear internet friend without having to resort to stacked parentheses?

We also took the opportunity to spend the free day in removed environs to go geocaching again. Which brings us to another thing I am also not good at estimating: everything having to do anything with geocaching. I suppose there's a sort of poetic beauty at work when what looks like a .7-mile walk turns into a two-hour hike through a forest, including some harrowing 45-degree descents and climbs and some intrepid bushwhacking through stands of poison oak and columns of buzzing, biting insects (I'm so bitten I look like I have the pox), but I'm guessing it would be a hell of a lot easier to appreciate that poetry if I hadn't also been conquering said wilderness in a ruffled skirt. Or if it hadn't been the hottest day of the year. Or if I hadn't ever heard a children's song that goes:

Poor babes in the woods,
poor babes in the woods,
remember, remember,
those babes in the woods.

They sighed and they sighed,
they cried and they cried,
those poor little children,
they laid down and died.

Dying was just one in a list of fears I entertained, which included getting arrested for trespassing, getting eaten by a bear/bobcat/swarm of insects/cannibal, going mad from heatstroke, getting back to where we'd parked to find the car burgled and/or stolen, and getting lost despite our high-tech handheld satellite equipment (that might run out of batteries!).

Simon, meanwhile, was just wishing he'd strapped the baby into some sort of carrying device more sophisticated than his two arms.

In the end, Simon's plan is working (he wants to trick Wombat into thinking we're an active, outdoorsy type of family), and even if we lose a few extremities to hummingbird-sized mosquitos along the way, we'll never say we didn't have adventures.

wrote Leah at 10:19 AM | Comments (5)