Friday am

It's Friday am and I had just a moment to post.

Getting out the door and on the road proved to be quite problematic. The Last Thousand Last Things kept biting me. Finally, I was almost packed up and ready to go... and I dropped the cell phone into the toilet! It was a clean toilet, but cell phones Don't Like Water. I grabbed it out quickly and stripped the battery off but no good--it was dead. BLEAH!!!! The Verizon rep said that I might be able to get it back, but not sure. It was possible that we could dry it out--that'd take a day or so just to see if it worked--but if I can't get it to come alive again, he said, there wasn't any way I could recover my (colossal) phone book. Uh-oh...

I was thinking about not having my cell phone to get in touch with everyone and vice versa while I was driving up and *then* having to find a Verizon store to get a new phone and activate it and THEN having to re-enter the 250 phone entries in there right now. {shudder} However, I got a suggestion a while later to try a blow dryer to get the water out. And lo! it worked well enough to get the phone alive. Suffice it to say, without describing the rest of my travails, my phone book was safe and all is now well. I'm buying the phone book software for this phone asap.

I made it to Seattle okay but it's a looooooong drive. Got up about 5:30pm to Seattle and visited Elisabeth at her store, the Seattle Teacup. Wonderful to see her once again and she really is looking amazingly less stressed than when I last saw her, which she attributes to having gotten out of the writing business entirely. :) I bought a number of gifts there, restocked my tea, and then headed south to Uwajimaya to meet up with Brian and Fong and Raymond.

Raymond is now nine months old and is even cuter than the pictures we saw of him a couple weeks ago, although it was hard to believe that that was possible. :) We picked up a whole range of sashimi and headed back to Brian and Fong's house in Burien and made a huge sushi dinner, which his parents were able to join us for. I really like his parents; they're wonderful people. Very late in the evening, I moseyed back north, checked in to the hotel, offloaded vast quantities of stuff from the car (when you drive, you can travel heavy--I did), and eventually went to sleep.

I'm now going to leap around and try to grab everything and head out for my first meeting du jour. Oy veh.

Friday am