Jiggety Jig

You'd think as often as I fly these days, that I would recover faster... but noooo. The switch to Daylight Savings Time hasn't helped, either. I'm moving pretty slowly, and mentally, I'm a bit foggy still. But I'm home.

My last day in Snohomish was wet. As were all of my days on the west coast.

But since I didn't go for the weather, the rain was only a minor inconvenience. I was able to spend some wonderful downtime with family and friends, as well as a couple of days speaking and teaching. And a whole lot of eating, and just a teensy bit of drinking. All in all, it was a fantastic week.

The flights home were smooth, outside of about twenty minutes of bumpity over The Rockies. Of course, the first, and only, blue sky I saw in Washington, appeared as I was boarding at SeaTac. It didn't take long to fly out of the bare ground, and back into snow.

I picked up Peter Straub's A Dark Matter in a bookstore in MSP, on the way out. I like Peter Straub, and his Ghost Story is one of the scariest books I've ever read, so I was excited to find this one in paperback. Hoo boy... take a minute and go read the Amazon reviews (which I wish I had done before I bought the book). It won't take long to learn that reactions to this book are mixed, and leaning toward the negative. I found it to be a confusing mish-mosh. The story was opaque, the writing was awkward and clunky, and I didn't believe in a single character (and their names, including the married couple who share a first name, were just plain weird). The story involves a writer who delves into a mysterious, otherworldly event that occurred forty years in the past. It sounds promising, but I finally had to give up on it. I just couldn't finish.

I had much better luck with Horns, by Joe Hill, which I bought at SeaTac yesterday, and devoured on the way home, finishing on the last hop from Minneapolis to Watertown. The story opens when Ig Perrish wakes up to discover that he's grown horns, and it barrels along from there. It's not perfect, but it was more than entertaining enough to get me through a long day in airports, and on planes.

Of course, it was still winter when I got home last night. But there is less of it now, than when I left. There are spots and strips of bare ground showing, and with temps above freezing, there will be more by the end of the week (or at least until the next snowstorm).

It's good to be back, snow or no snow- tomorrow I begin work on MG Fantasy Version 3.0. Though I have 3 more festivals on my calendar in the next 5 months, all of them are car-trips. For the first time in about two years, I have no flight itineraries parked under the crock on the kitchen countertop. I wonder how long that will last.