Off to Bosque!

Life is good, if a bit hairy today.

After a day of running around that included much packing and attending to details; shipping my last 36 copies of Letters from Eden to New Mexico at the very last minute because there turned out to be no copies in Socorro for my planned booksigning; leaving my whingeing bi-colored son at the vet's kennel; crying a little, but knowing he'll be fine; lining up the housesitters, sitting in the waiting room at the quick care facility to see about an infected finger; going to the bank, the grocery store, and the pharmacy; and trying to figure out how to turn four carry-ons into two; I am going to drug myself and try to get a few hours of sleep. A Benadryl and some rotgut local red wine should do the trick. When I wake up at 3:30 it'll be time to get up. The only benefit of insomnia that I've discovered--it helps with those wee hour drives to the airport, 2 hours away.

I checked on the availability of wireless Internet in Socorro today and wasn't encouraged by the reply, which amounted to, "What's wireless Internet?" Mind you, I wasn't really expecting Internet access at our little motel, but I was thinking how nice it would be to give dispatches from the front. Know that if we can, BOTB and I will post. If we can't, well, we can't, and we'll just have to look at cranes instead.

We'll eat at Frank and Lupe's, we'll raise a beer at the brewery, we'll down a green chile cheeseburger at the Owl Bar, and we'll stand agog at the clamor of a million snow and Ross' geese. We'll look for whooping cranes and a real Santa Fe engine. We'll show the kids the desert. We'll go to Water Canyon and listen for the quiet, and we'll take the lonely road to Magdalena and look for mountain bluebirds. We'll hug each other in the perfect silence of the high desert.

Thanks for your patience. Keep checking back, OK?