Outrunning a Blizzard

Spent the night in Roswell, New Mexico. It was here that in 1947 an alien spacecraft supposedly landed and the corpses of aliens were strewn over a nearby field. The town has capitalized on the legend. There are alien-related things all over the place, including on the WalMart. Downtown is a UFO museum, which we arrived too late to tour. There are several alien bars and alien zones, whatever that means. A drawing of an alien even gives the weather report in the newspaper. All pretty campy and funny.

There are blizzard warnings out for most of New Mexico over the next 24 hours. We’re heading for Texas. Probably San Angelo tonight, would be my guess. San Angelo is an oasis in the desert, and I like it there. They have a couple of good places to eat there. We stayed in San Angelo last year on an RV trip, and I called an old writer friend of mine, Elmer Kelton, who lived there. I was hoping we might be able to see him and his wife Ann, but they were busy. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was gravely ill, and not long afterward went into the hospital. He died a short time later. I felt the loss immediately, remembered our short phone conversation, and was glad we had at least had that. He was someone I admired. So it will be odd to go through that town and know that he’s no longer there.

Before we left home, I bought a battery charger for my laptop so I could use it in the car. The thing plugs into the cigarette lighter and then my laptop cord plugs into it. Makes a very high-pitched whine, and I’m not sure it should do that. But it does allow me access to my laptop beyond the internal battery life, which is down to about an hour now. My SO likes books on CD and he listens to those while I do whatever I want on the computer. I don’t know why it is, but I have a hard time with comprehension when I listen to those audio books. I used to like them, but no longer seem to be able to focus my mind on the story. Could also be that he and I have different taste in books. He likes thrillers and mysteries, and I’m not much of a fiction reader at all anymore. So I can do my thing, even watch a DVD if I want with my headphones, while he listens to his books. We don’t do either of these things, though, until we’re well into a car trip, after we’ve pretty much exhausted conversation. Both of us need our “own” time, and this is one of the ways we get it.

I’m really missing my kitty. I’m sure he’s missing me as well. I’ve talked to the cat-sitter a couple of times, and she says he seems content. I seriously doubt that. Sometimes wish I had a kitty-cam so I could see what he does when he’s alone. I wonder if he wanders through the house yowling like he does for the first few days after we have returned from one of these extended trips. It’s like he’s calling out to see if I’m there. I always answer him. I need my snuggle buddy and was thinking of that this morning as I laid awake in our motel room at 4:30 am. I’ll make time for a nap with kitty once I’m back in my place.

Onward ....