.In the time since you have last heard from our intrepid travelers, several interesting things have not happened. That is, we are no closer (as of yet) to figuring out where Our Big Trip will end. It needs to end in the somewhat near future, because we very accurately and studiously budgeted so that we could travel through the end of the year. The end of the year has now come and gone, and we are out of travel money. The reason we have not spent time exploring career options is that Beth has received a definite job offer, but the company is not exactly sure about the launch date of the financial programs with which she will be working, and is not even sure where they would like her to go to work for them. So we are awaiting further developments and spending time with (NOT mooching off) relatives. That's why your humble narrator has not gone to work utilizing his extensive cable-installation skills. What cable installation skills, you ask? Read on, dear um... reader. A lot of the past six weeks or so were spent relaxing and enjoying family in New Jersey and New Hampshire. It's been nice to be able to just chill out with our families and not feel like we had to run all over the place all the time and see everybody within the space of a week or so. So a lot of the time we just sat around a kitchen table and laughed and joked and caught up and met new significant others. So, I'll just put in some of the highlights of those parts of the last few weeks of our trip in which I almost fell through a ceiling and Beth tried to kill me again and we nearly froze to death. Froze to death, you ask? Indeed, I reply.
Your poor, suffering humble narrator is tardy with this update because he was stricken ill. So ill, in fact, that Beth took me to the Emergency Room. It was there discovered that I was infected with, well, I'll let the discharge instructions from The Robert Wood Johnson Hospital do the talking:
You have acute bronchitis. This disease is an infection or inflammation of the air passageways in your lungs. (Etc. etc. etc.) Most cases of bronchitis get better without antibiotics. We prescribe antibiotics (which your humble narrator received) when we believe bacteria are damaging your airways, or if there is a high risk the bronchitis will worsen into pneumonia. (Drink lots of water, get a humidifier, etc. etc. etc.).
So, dear readers, you see, your humble narrator was reeling on death's doorstep for a period of time, and it was only due to Beth's devoted nursing skills and some of that crumb coffee cake with double crumbs for crumb lovers that got me through. It sure stunk not being able to sleep for about 3 days in a row because I was coughing so hard that even my eyes started to hurt. Phew.
That crumb coffee cake with double crumbs for crumb lovers is some good stuff, though.
We arrived to Beth's brother Tom and his wife Jeannette and their baby girl Emma's place today. T, J and E, however, were not there. They had left to go New Jersey for the holidays. So we used their house as a base to do our Christmas wrapping.
We drove up from North Carolina to New Jersey, where we planned to spend Christmas. When we got to Baltimore, we passed the exit that would have led us back to Bill and Katie Hester's, and we toyed with the idea of crashing their place with a mere hour's notice, as we had done a couple of months earlier, just to see their reaction. We chose, however, to continue on and get to our destination. We did so and were greeted warmly by Kirsten and Bob and Kirsten's dog Domino and Bob's dog Melinko. Plato, who you may remember, is OUR dog, seemed barely moved by the fact that we had arrived. When Kirsten went to bed, all 3 of the dogs followed her up to her room. Hmmph. It seems that Plato had indeed made herself at home with them. That may be a good thing, because she may wind up living with them permanently. But more on that later.
Bob needed some assistance today on his route. Bob is a cable installer, and if you ever see him, to my knowledge no one has ever chanted "Caa-haable Guuuy" at him in that singsong voice that Jim Carrey used in the movie "Cable Guy," so he would probably get a HUGE kick out of it. Really. Anyway, we set out to "sling some cable," which is what we in the biz call going to work. Bob gave me a rundown of how the whole cable thing works, and showed me some of the tools of his trade and the basic way to apply those tools to the task at hand. Our first stop consisted of a trip up the utility pole, running some cable across a couple of rooms, and hooking cable to the back of 5 TV's. Bob handled the climbing the utility pole outside. This was NOT because 1)your humble narrator would have NO idea about what to do while balancing on top of a utility pole or 2)your humble narrator is deathly afraid of ladders and all things that require a person to sway dangerously above the ground. This was because, and I'm completely serious about this, your humble narrator has the wrong blood type. You see, when a cable installer makes connections in the box-thingy connected to the power and phone wires dangling off the utility poles outside a house, he has to add a little ticket to the wire that lists his blood type. When working so close to all the electricity that scoots through power lines, it is important not to upset the delicate balance by causing potentially dangerous electrochemical reactions. Certain blood types do not get along well, causing these blood types to be referred to in the medical industry as "Type Hatfield" and "Type McCoy." In the same way that the human body will reject the wrong blood type, a cable installation by a person of the wrong blood type will cause the cable installation to reject the installer and throw his lifeless form to the ground. Since I thought it would be rude of me to kick the bucket when my family had gone and spent good money on Christmas gifts for me, I let Bob climb the pole. We finished that job in nothing flat and were off to our next stop. I figured that, based on our first job, the second would be a breeze as well. Alas, it was not. Here is where I learned the terrible truth about the life of The Cable Guy. Bob gets information about what he needs to complete, but no information about what he needs to do to get there. Say a home wants 5 TV's hooked up for cable. This could mean that the homeowners recently moved in and all that needs to happen is that preexisting cables need to get plugged into the backs of the TV's, or it could mean that a line needs to be run from the telephone pole at the street into the attic, a splitter needs to be attached to the cable coming in from the street, wires need to be fed through the walls into the various rooms and holes must be drilled in the walls of the rooms to drag the cable (once it's located in the wall) out into the room, where it can be attached to a wall fixture. THEN the TV can be plugged in. Obviously, the time needed to complete such jobs can vary widely, but the cable company doesn't really take this into account when scheduling the installers, so that is why your cable guy, who is supposed to arrive between 8am and 12pm doesn't show up until 3. It's not the cable guy's fault! Don't yell at him! Our second job was the more difficult kind. While climbing around in the attic looking for a place to feed the lines, your humble narrator slipped and almost went through the ceiling into the bedroom below. House ingredients, for those of you not as constructionally inclined as your humble narrator, are 1 of 2 types:
1. Structural parts- those parts that allow the house to maintain its shape in the midst of natural forces such as wind and gravity.
2. Aesthetic parts- those parts that give you a place to hang your (in the case of Beth) Johnny Depp posters and which allow your relatives to mock you behind your back for choosing a poor color scheme.
Anyway, when wandering around an attic it is important to note the difference between structural parts (which can be walked confidently upon) and aesthetic parts (which will crumble instantly if looked at wrong). As your humble narrator was balancing on 2 2X4's, I reached over to pull a cable up out of an opening and slipped. Without thinking, I put one of my feet down to brace myself on the flimsy rice paper ceiling. I probably had my weight on it for about half a second before Bob and I both realized that I was doing a very foolish thing. Bob yelled something like "don't Don't DOn't DON't DON'T!" as I shifted my balance back on to one of the structural portions of the house. After we climbed back down the ladder into the bedroom, I was relieved to see that there was no visible evidence of my faux pas, which was rather shocking. We're talking about a half an inch of sheetrock being subjected to a weight between 200lbs. and Warren Sapp. And the woman who owned this house, which was roughly as big as The Taj Mahal (and more ornately decorated) did not seem the easygoing type who would shrug off a Your Humble Narrator-Sized Hole in her daughter's bedroom ceiling. Disaster narrowly averted, to be sure.
We spent a really fun day with our New Jersey relatives, whom we hadn't seen on Christmas for 7 years. We enjoyed visiting and we all collected lots of great loot .
Today my mother, Beth and I drove up to New Hampshire where my sister Lisl and brother Eric live. We were excited to see them, and meet Lisl's boyfriend Steve and visit with her son Dean. Here is a picture of Dean, especially for those of you who felt it necessary to give our photographic team a hard time for not taking any pictures of him back in September 
. We got up there okay, but were greeted by some plenty cold weather. Speaking of cold weather, I'd like to explain what cold weather is. See, I used to think of cold weather as having 2 gradations: cold enough to snow, and REALLY cold (which is anything below about 15 degrees). After spending some time in New Hampshire (Franconia, precisely) these past few weeks I have learned a new appreciation for temperature. One day while foolishly out, I was driving through Littleton, the town where my brother lives, and I spied the clock on Main Street that gives the time and temperature. It read 23. 23 with a minus sign in front of it. Yes folks, your humble narrator was risking his life driving around in 23 degrees below zero weather. Now, for those of you who really can't appreciate what that means, here's an interesting bit of perspective. 32 degrees is the temperature at which water freezes. Contrast 32 degrees with 87 degrees, which is about as warm as it gets in many parts of the country ever. Hot, huh? Swimming and air conditioner weather, right? Well, 87 is 55 degrees (it sure would be nice if there was a "degrees" doodad on the computer so I didn't have to keep typing "degrees," or if there is one, it sure would be nice if I knew how to use it) WARMER than the temperature at which water freezes. HUGE, HUGE difference. Okay, now here's the part that will blow you away. Ready? 23 below is 55 degrees COLDER than the temperature at which water freezes. I bet you're all feeling arthritic just reading that. Okay, here's one more. One night, the weather station on top of Mount Washington, located a few miles from Lisl's house, registered a temperature of minus 44 with a 55 degree wind chill for a grand total of... 99 degrees below zero. Using my fun perspective-ometer, that is the same distance BELOW freezing as 153 degrees above. Not a lot you can do on those days except play Sorry! 
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Beth tried to kill me again by hurling a cast iron frying pan at my foot. I didn't break any bones, but the middle three toes of my left foot hurt like heck and were an interesting shade of purple for a couple of weeks. Beth claims it was, get this, an "accident." Now, if this was the first "accident" that had occurred on Our Big Trip I may have believed her, but now I'm not so sure.
My sister Lisl, her son Dean, my brother Eric, and Beth and I headed out early for Cannon Mountain, a ski resort 10 minutes away. We decided that we would go tubing. Cannon has a tubing park with a lift and everything, so you can slide down without the nasty secondhand trials of having to walk back up. Eric took to it with all the vigor which was expected, being the daredevil he is. Beth did as well, which led me to recollect an interesting fact about Beth and her more latent Evil Knevilish aspects. There was one time when Beth took off lying on her stomach on the tube and zoomed down the hill at breakneck speed. At the bottom there is a large embankment which is there so that tubists do not careen into lines of beginning skiers waiting for the rope tows to take them on the beginning, or Pony, or Bunny slopes. That would be a recipe for disaster. Humor, indeed, but disaster as well. Anyway, Beth came at this wall (which, due to the warming and cooling of the mountain over the winter, was chock full of jagged ice clumps at about 90 mph (or 150 kilometers per hour, for those of you in Europe). That, by the way, dear readers, is yet another clever example of foreshadowing. So she comes at this wall, and hits it face first, sending up a cloud of ice and snow. I think it was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. It was so scary that I dropped what I was holding to run out onto the tubing course to rescue my certainly unconscious and possibly worse wife. It so happened that what I was holding was the leash for the inner tube that contained my 2-year-old nephew. So, I was running out to save Beth and Dean was sliding down the hill towards the aforementioned beginning skiers. Fortunately, Lisl had the presence of mind to grab Dean's inner tube and Beth had managed (unbeknownst to us onlookers) to put her hand in front of her face to stop the wall of deadly ice from rendering her in need of plastic surgery. When the snow settled, Dean was okay and Beth survived with a rather chewed up and bloody, but unbroken, hand. Phew.
This evening we got a great lesson in physics. Specifically, the physics of air pressure, or vacuums, or something. We took a ride up to Elizabeth, NJ to meet with our friends Jim Feeney and Christine Pluta (who is a D.O., so she has become known to your humble narrator as "Doctor P.") Anyway, we met up at Los Gauchos, a Uruguayan restaurant. Jim brought some wine for dinner, but on the way over, one of the bottles rolled off the seat of his car and developed an almost imperceptible crack. "No biggie," Jim thought slyly as he sauntered into the restaurant with 2 bottles of wine, 1 inverted. He coolly asked for a bottle opener and began to uncork the cracked bottle. Those of you who are physicists, I'm guessing, can see what's about to happen and are shielding your eyes in terror, while reading this at the same time, which is a good trick, and I would like to learn it someday, only I'm assuming you have to be a physicist to know how to do it. Anyway, the cork comes out and the bottle becomes a black hole, sucking oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, silverware, hairpieces and anything else not nailed down into its bottomless depths. All this sucking on one end means, of course, there must be pushing on the other, and there was. Jim wound up wearing most of the cabernet tsunami, though Beth was hit as well. While Jim, Beth and 2 of the waitresses cleaned up the mess, Christine moved our food and belongings to another table and your humble narrator took pictures of the crimson debacle 
. Someone, after all, has to document the happenings of Our Big Trip, and while I would much rather have been up to my elbows in red wine, I had to make the sacrifice and sit in the background and capture all of the real life drama. To be a top-notch journalist, you have to make sacrifices. It looked like a scene from "The Godfather" 
. We got ourselves re-situated in a dry locale and proceeded to spend over 4 hours eating and talking. We had a great time 
.
Bob has destroyed his kitchen. Not just because he hates cooking, but because he wants to remodel it. As much as Beth and I tried to make ourselves scarce while the heavy labor was going on, we found ourselves in the uncomfortable situation of watching TV while Bob was tearing down the ceiling with loud grunts and groans in the next room. So, we were drafted. Beth found that pounding on plaster walls and making them crumble was quite therapeutic 
. I found it to be quite distasteful. I do not have the carpentry gene (or the car mechanic gene either, for that matter). So, despite Bob's constant reassurance that he would "make a carpenter out of me yet" while I almost cut my fingers off with a power saw, almost nailed myself to a wall with an air-powered nailgun and almost dropped a door on my head, I'm not entirely sure he was successful. All I know is that when the time comes for Beth and I to renovate our house, I'm getting acute bronchitis again. We won't get to see the finished product, but by the time we come back, the kitchen will be new and sparkling and refreshingly free of things that need to be done, except for making Chicken With 40 Garlic Cloves, which I don't mind doing at all.
I was hoping to have some resolution to how exactly Our Big Trip would end before posting this update, but that's not gonna happen. The two big issues have to do with money.
ISSUE 1: We ain't got no money. This is because we budgeted to travel until the end of the year, and it is now 2 months past that date. So, in order to rectify that situation, we need to reduce overhead. Overhead includes the van and our health insurance. So, the first thing to do is sell the van. In order to do this, we need to go back to San Francisco where the nifty middle seat that we took out is. The nifty screws that hold the nifty seat in place are there, too, but darned if I can remember where I put them. That could make for an interesting couple of days.
ISSUE 2: We ain't got no way to get no money. Beth has traditionally been the main breadwinner in our relationship, and she had a job offer that was due to start January 1. Another offer came in, however, which put that company's future in limbo. So, this other thing may or may not happen and if it doesn't the original thing may or may not happen. Since Beth has no control over the first thing (am I being vague enough? I feel like a celebrity spokesperson who has to answer questions about their employer's being caught naked in a convent with a lampshade over his head), and the people who have control over the first thing have little or no interest about the second thing and its timetable, all we can do is sit around and play dominoes with my sister Kirsten. Plus, the first thing would be located in England and the second would be in The Bay Area. So we can't even get an apartment because we're not sure where we'll be living. Now, without income, we wouldn't be able to get a place to live anyhow, but let's not split hairs. But we've decided that no matter where we end up in the long run, and pretty much anything, with the exception of being located on the shore of The Great Salt Lake, which, in a recent discussion with my Aunt Elise and Uncle Spencer and my cousin Scott and his wife Karen, we realized was probably the biggest letdown of Our Big Trip, is possible, we first need to get rid of the van, which, we decided, we would not use enough to justify keeping it. Go back and read that sentence again. It makes sense. I think it's one of my best. 87 words. So we're off to the left coast tomorrow. Plato will not be joining us, because if we go to Europe she will have to be quarantined for 6 months, and we can't justify doing that to a 13-year-old dog, and even if we stay in San Francisco, there are enough unanswered questions about where we will live, when we will move there, and how many stairs it will have, that it seems a lot of stress to put her through. She seems to really enjoy staying at Kirsten and Bob's, and it will make a good place for her retirement. A tough decision, to be sure, but dragging her all over the country seems selfish on our part, especially since she has reached the point that, even when offered, she turns down "Car Rides," her prior favorite activity.
When we first set out on Our Big Trip, we asked ourselves what the worst thing was that could happen. We decided that it would be that we would find ourselves broke, homeless and jobless. Well, that is exactly what has happened. However, we wouldn't take back our trip for the world. Well, for the world we would, except maybe the middle east (that place is a mess) and, of course, The Great Salt Lake. But we wouldn't take it back for some money and a place to live. When I go back and read these updates instead of writing the new one like I say I'm planning to, I realize how much we've seen and how much I've already forgotten. We've had a ball. I think we did really well, too, being together so much after never seeing one another for the first 14 years we were an item. I can't say it was the trip of a lifetime, because I'm not dead yet, but it was definitely the trip of 33 years, 11 3/4 months. Which reminds me:
Only 10 more shopping days until your humble narrator's 34th birthday! March 11 will be here before you know it! Shop today! Beat the rush!
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