OMAHA, Day 5 The Final Hours

I shut off the alarm at 4:50am. How ridiculous! A yoga class at 5:30am on the far south-west side of Omaha. I’ll save two punches for my next trip to Omaha.

JE’s working today and has a Master’s class tonight, so CA and I are packing up and driving to Gigi’s house today. LE has her 15 mos. Pediatrician appt. and MA indicates that he can handle the two little ones. By 10:15am we’re in the car and heading east on Cumings. CA wants his McDonald’s breakfast this morning… 3 oatmeal raisin cookies and a Diet Coke. We’ve already had coffee with MA—the brew we selected at The Greenbrier just a few weeks ago. I invoke my fleeting self-control and skip Mickey D’s entirely. I had a creamy Stoneyfield’s Soy Yogurt before leaving the house. I love the smaller containers, and they’ve improved the texture. It’s almost as creamy as Greek yogurt.

CA drives and we decide to put in the book-on-CD that we brought along—Frances Mayes latest, Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life, read by the author herself. It’s delightful from the get-go, although I’d forgotten she was southern and it takes me just a bit to adjust to her accent. We’ve read both her previous books and I saw her in person at a preview screening of Under the Tuscan Sun at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora, IL in 2003 during the now defunct Midwest Literary Festival. Her writing is poetic (both she and Ed are in fact poets). I like how she experiences and recounts the everyday simple, yet delightful moments of her life. She would be a great blogger, but that would be a step backward, I guess, as she’s already found a way to support her dream lifestyle.

I’m loving laying back and listening to Frances Mayes stories, inevitably drowsing just a little. An hour or so down the road, I’m hungry, but luckily there’s bottled water, chicken salad and sour dough bread from Wohlner’s in our cooler, so I have a car picnic. By 12:30pm CA is hungry and it’s time for a pit stop for us and for the car. I remind him there’s a Chick-fil-A in Coralville at the mall, so he has a goal. We don’t have Chick-fil-A yet in Illinois, although the server says there’s one to open soon in Chicago. I get excited to get an Arnold Palmer (½ iced tea and ½ lemonade) with extra ice. This’ll last until we arrive in Eureka.

JE calls along the way to say that both JA and LE have the hand, foot, and mouth virus that plagues daycare centers and schools. Both have it just in their mouths. First there is a fever, and then after a couple of days the fever breaks and the sores appear. Good thing LE had a pre-scheduled appt. today. There’s not Rx, but they’ll need Ibuprofen for a few days to help with the pain. LE won’t cooperate, but JA shows his mommy the sores in his mouth—she says they’re severe.

MA says that JA got impatient with LE today when she was playing with his blue soccer ball until MA pointed out that she was trying to play Kite Guy with him.

We switch drivers a couple of times along the way, and pull into Gigi’s just after 5:30pm. The television is on, the front door is ajar, life is evident, but no Gigi. CA checks the sunroom and then her bathroom; I check the garage and see the car is gone. In a few minutes, she arrives home having gone out for a few bottles of wine.

Gigi’s planning on BLTs, but first we snack on sour dough bread, chips and salsa, and the pecan-cherry bratwurst we forgot to eat last night. It’s all good, and I’m feeling like dinner is over when she pops the bacon into the microwave, slices the tomatoes and lettuce, and calls us to dinner. I eat more. One has to be polite…

CA and Gigi are into the College Baseball World Series on television in the sunroom, so I navigate the ancient t.v. console in the living room. The remote works, kind of. I can’t channel surf as effectively as I’d like, but after more than a week with almost no television, I’m happy.

Tomorrow I’ll help Gigi with some computer stuff—downloading photos and ordering online. In the afternoon I’ll visit my dad and his wife, and then Aunt Margie to move her ahead on our project. We’d planned to head home tomorrow, but will stay one more night and leave on Wednesday.