Back home again

by Diane Duane
A silver 2002 Jaguar

So…back home once more.

As we left LA, Peter gave up the silver rental Jag with some regret and considerable affection. He’d always wanted to drive one: now he’s had his chance (and interestingly still holds that the Mercedes we rented to do some errands in a few months ago was a nicer car). The most useful thing about that car, though, was the NeverLost GPS system. It couldn’t cure the LA traffic, but it sure took the strain out of getting to all those meetings.

After a night in the airport hotel (not terribly inspiring: the Crowne Plaza there is just a hopped-up Holiday Inn, not nearly as nice as the Crowne Plaza in Bruges…), we headed for NYC again. To me there always seems to be a change of rhythm on these homeward legs — a little more frenetic, a little less satisfying — and when (as usual on trips to the US) the last leg involves NY, it acquires a somewhat bittersweet quality, as we leave what remains (Zurich and Basel notwithstanding) my favorite city on Earth.

We didn’t do the final leg of shopping that we’d been envisioning. Peter was having too much fun sleeping in, after a long week of doing all the driving, and I spent Sunday and about half of Monday doing final work on the roughs for A Wizard Alone, handling some final queries and adding some afterthought material. We had a late and very satisfying dinner with that estimable editor Michael Stearns on Sunday night, saw him briefly again on Monday to hand off the roughs, and then headed for the airport. My enduring memory of NY on this trip: the flags, flags everywhere… It reminded me of Ireland during the World Cup fever, but obviously with a more sober note to it. …Yet there seemed to me to be something else in the air, too: a sense of, “You may kill us, but damned if we’re gonna stop doing what we do for you.” It feels as if NY has learned a little of the Belfast spirit: even before the shift toward peace, those people just were not going to stop partying because there was a possibility they might get blown up at any moment. Possibly a good way to handle matters, since the bomb that is entropy is going to go off under all our butts sooner or later, no matter how safe we try to be. But NY is coming out of shock, I think. I knew it would.

The flight home was uneventful except for some choppy air secondary to thunderstorms off the East Coast. We were in Dublin by 8 AM, neither of us feeling too horrible: back home by 10, after picking up another rental and swinging by our local post office. Everything seems to have weathered our absence without too much trouble. The fishpond fish are all OK, though the pond’s kind of weedy; the rockery seems not to have suffered too much from slugs while were gone. The rosebush on Lilith’s grave / Kasha’s memorial, which had the leaves eaten off it twice by sheep, has leafed out again and has flowers coming (though the buds are covered with aphids, and I don’t know where the bug spray is: I have a feeling I’m going to wind up spraying them with garlic water or something).

The one thing that did go wrong while we were gone seems, on closer inspection, as if it may not be such a problem after all. This far down in the country we get some pretty emphatic power spikes sometimes, and occasionally one is violent enough to trip the circuitbreakers in the house. Naturally this had to happen while we were gone, and our landlord, on discovering it, also discovered that he couldn’t find his set of our housekeys: we had to FedEx him ours so he could get in and turn on the power again. We had assumed that everything in the fridge and freezer would be a loss, since we weren’t sure how long the power had been off when the landlord discovered the problem, and it took nearly a week from the discovery to his getting our housekeys and being able to do something. There was some moaning about the freezer in particular (My Swiss grilling and braising sausages! Peter’s homegrown habaneros…!) But on returning we found that the food shows no sign of having defrosted. The freezer (a Bosch “larder freezer”) does indeed have insulation guaranteed to keep food frozen for 72 hours after a power failure, assuming the door’s not opened. It looks as if it may have kept the food frozen a lot longer than that…and if this turns out to be the case, boyoboy, do those people have my loyalty from now on. We’ll be checking the food more carefully over the next couple of days to see if our suspicions are right.

So after a day off, we get back to what passes for routine around here. Tonight, Mary the Cat Lady brings the kitties home. In a few days, after Squeak and Goodman have settled in again, we bring the new kitten, Beemer, home at last (which event promises to open a whole new chapter in the local cat “soap opera”). Tomorrow there are premises due in LA for a couple of animated scripts, and I now have to get back to finishing the third Rihannsu book and The Door Into Starlight. After that, work begins on Wizards’ Holiday, and continues on the feature screenplay, “Puss”. We also get to take down the old concrete-block fishpond and install a new in-ground one.

Business as usual…

But right now I’m still a little stiff from the flight. Time to go take an aspirin and have some ramen, then put my feet up and watch Cartoon Network for a while. And “Six Feet Under” is on tonight, and “West Wing” tomorrow. Or is it the other way around? I forget.

It’s nice to be home…

[tags]Jaguar, Mercedes, NeverLost, GPS, Crowne Plaza, Bosch, freezer, FedEx, Rihannsu[/tags]

You may also like

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt out if you wish. Accept Read More