8/14/23

Greetings and Salutations, Friends!!!

I am sitting in the hubster’s chair in the living room. Why, you ask? Because there are two yarn project bags in my chair. Why not move them? When I came in the room, I had a bowl of cereal and a plate of English muffins in one hand and a mug of water in the other. Besides I have already done my exercise for the day by changing the sheets and starting the dishwasher.

Good heavens! Has the household level of work excellence dropped so very low?

Yes. Yes, it has. We have Covid. Or probably OmicronXBB1.5.

Bare minimum is the keyword. Rest is the other.

And how and where did we catch this?

Well, I can tell you one thing, it wasn’t in the dispersed sites we camped in on the way to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. Those sites are in the middle of nowhere.

We literally camped on a ridge above the SD Badlands on the way out, and on a hill amongst the buttes of the ND Badlands on our return.

Black Angus shared our ridge in SD. Ten feet between the camper and the edge.

Both had gorgeous sunsets and sunrises.

Nearest neighbors in ND were a city block distance away.

Nearest neighbors in SD were sixty feet away.

And the other dispersed sites were just as distanced.

So, where did we catch this? My guess is on the only day we played tourist in West Yellowstone.

Yep. Shopped, ate in a cafe, went to the Grizzly and Wolf Center, did laundry, and picked up provisions at the grocery store.

And had huckleberry ice cream from The Creamery. Soooo good.

Two days later I had a sore throat.

Two days after that the hubster had a sore throat. On the last drive day of the trip. Phew.

So we’ve been laying low since then.

Good thing I can sit and type, though, hunh??!

******nope. No transition******

The first story I have involves putting on lipstick in the car. No, no, it wasn’t the typical “w” shape drawn on the lips and caused by the bumps in the road——although, boy do I have a story about bumps in the road!!!!

No, this one was more spectacular. All I did was take off the cap of the lipstick.

Simple, right? Small chance of a problem, right?

Wrong. The little cylinder of lipstick was somehow attached to the cap and went flying when I opened it.

And, where did it go?

Well, I was wearing a red dress, it could have landed there and not been that noticeable. It could have landed in my hand that was holding the cap—that would have been great. It could have landed on the floor whereupon I picked it up easily.

Nope. None of these.

It flew down that little maddening trench between the seat and the console.

That place where you can if you scrape your knuckles to get waaaaay down to the bottom, sometimes grab whatever fell with your middle and pointer fingers and wedge it back into the light.

Now envision what I was trying to retrieve. A three quarter inch long by one half inch wide slippery cylinder of lipstick. The more I tried, the less a cylinder shape it was becoming. It was morphing into a mound of red orange putty. It was getting all over my fingers which made it all the more difficult to hold on to the slippery little bugger.

I tried. And tried. And tried.

And the more I tried, the more lipstick squished into the metal framework of the seat.

When I finally pulled up some lipstick, it was just a fraction of the original cylinder. The rest was on my hands and on the framework below. All I can say is good thing I had grabbed extra napkins from Hardees the day before. The next time we stopped, I got under the seat and wiped the metalwork, then wiped the trench sides.

Glad that battle was over.

But it wasn’t because when we had stopped, it was to pick up sandwiches for lunch in Jackson Hole, WY. I was rearranging all the stuff on my lap as we were getting going again, when I couldn’t find my sandwich.

Yes.

It had.

My plastic wrapped chicken salad sandwich had fallen into the trench.

Now, if I had thought that a lipstick morphed as I tried to get it out, that sandwich became a completely different entity. When I grabbed it, it smooshed up into my hand, making my hand too big to get through the trench. When I smoothed it down, I couldn’t get hold of it to pull it up. The bread wasn’t helping either. It joined the chicken salad in the morph.

Thank goodness the plastic wrap held.

Eventually I somehow got the sandwich up and out of the trench in one piece. And then I went online and ordered seat gap fillers.

I need to rest now, but I’ll be back. There are more camping stories from this last trip to be told.

Have a Mahvelous Monday. Listen to the birds, go for a walk, call a friend. Hug someone you love.

Love,

Janet