goodbye

Tonight we said goodbye to Paul. I got two hugs--Erik got zero. Driving home, he said he was jealous. I said, "Because he hugged me, or because you didn't get any?" He said the latter. I said, "That's just gender trouble."

We talked to his chicken Sparky. He showed us where two mourning doves made a nest in his hanging planter in the back yard. There's one baby chick, and a parent is on the nest at all times--they take shifts.

He showed us his camping equipment, including the flames of two stoves, one he made, a Pepsi can stove, which I said is brilliant. He told us about his method of backpacking 20 miles a day for ten days, but he did 25 miles a day and arrived two days early.

He took a picture with a camera he bought in 1979 when he went to Alaska. "Do you want to know how old I was in 1979?" I asked. He braced himself.

He served Erik homemade lemonade. And he had to kick us out. We would have stayed forever.

This morning I was a hair's breadth from not going to work becuse I was panicking from the moment I woke up to about half-way to work, when I calmed myself by writing in my head. Bad dreams. But it was a relatively easy day, because we finished up topic one and trained on topic two, which is easy.

Tomorrow we're getting up early to make the five-and-a-half-hour drive to my parents' house. Too much is happening.