h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello again. We came back early. Mrs. Subcom was "home-sick" in a weird way. In spite of the fact that she still wants to move back to Houston some day, she got sick of visiting Houston, mainly because we were staying with relatives instead of paying for motel rooms. She wanted to return to the sanctuary of our house back up north, where she can sit at the computer surfing in a housecoat all day, farting or swearing or eating microwave dinners whenever she wants. The kind of total relaxation that you can't achieve even when staying with your closest friends or relatives.

We visited my cousin's family in Elkton, Kentucky, Mrs. Subcom's dad in Meridian, Mississippi, a slew of Mrs. Subcom's siblings and neices around Houston, another of my cousins in Houston, drove around Galveston a little bit, and finally zipped back up to Michigan within a few days when Mrs. Subcom said she wanted to go back home. It wasn't exactly being "homesick," just wanting to relieve the low-level stress of 24 hour "visiting" when you stay at relatives' houses.

In order to make the trip even shorter, I drove the last stretch from Meridian, Mississippi to our place in Michigan all in one day, 879 miles in about 15 hours. Even counting the stops for gas and food and trying to get the kitten to eat and use the litter (more on her in a moment), we averaged 58.6 miles per hour. I thought that was pretty impressive, but my mother the truck driver said we must have been going fairly slowly, since she averages 50-something miles per hour in the truck, and there are lower speed limits for trucks than for regular cars. Still, I drove further and more hours than a professional trucker is legally allowed to drive in a day. (Which only means they have to fiddle with their log-books after the fact to make it look legal.)

KITTEN! We already had a cat named Lucky. I didn't want to get any more cats while we lived in the apartment, because it seems like cramped quarters, and we don't let her outside except on a leash. So when we moved into the house, we talked about getting a new kitten. We didn't want to do it before going on vacation, because we didn't want to burden my mother and step-father with more animals while we were gone. They have 5 cats, a german shepherd, two horses, a cockatiel and a parrot. This would amount to 12 animals if we asked them to babysit 2 cats for us.

Melinda's grandmother in Mississippi usually has a brood of cats and kittens that she feeds, so we thought we might be able to get one of those on our way back north to Michigan. She didn't have any small ones, but Mrs. Subcom's dad's fiance had a kitten she was trying to get rid of. (In case you're related to him and you haven't heard the news elsewhere: yes, Mrs. Subcom's dad is engaged to a nice lady named Mary Jane. Weird. Wife and I are both going to have step-parents.)

So we picked out a calico kitten, female, two months old. Mostly black or dark brown with small random patches of orange and tan. There's a subdued tiger-striping in the orange spots, but you can barely see it. And she has a little orange blotch on her forehead that Mrs. Subcom uses as a kissing target.

We brainstormed names for her, turning most of them into middle names, because we liked them too much to throw them away. Her name is "Lozie Ocarina Okra-tina Patches" Deidzoeb-Smith. (Not really Deidzoeb, of course.) We wanted to emphasize her Mississippi heritage, so that's the reason for "Okra." "Patches" was the name that her foster mother Mary Jane had given her. And "Lozie" was the first name of Mrs. Subcom's maternal grandmother, supposedly descended from Gen. Robert E. Lee, but aren't we all? Pronounced "LOW-zee."

Lucky and Lozie are still hissing and clawing each other occasionally, but they managed to sleep within a few feet of each other recently, so they're adjusting. Lozie pokes into everything, climbs on everything, knocks over everything she can manage to knock over, almost to the point that I regret getting her, but not quite. We haven't made the house kitten-proof, but she's doing the job for us by knocking over everything that isn't kitten-proof.

And I think I've put the pirate novel in a reasonable order, polished it a little. I got the Writer's Market 2002 from the library and I'm looking for places to submit it. If no one talks me out of it, this is really about to happen.

Later,
Deidzoeb