the unimportant parts of my trip. plus a driving tip.
I had a wonderful time visiting with Molly this weekend! Mono lake is much more beautiful than i remember it, and the town of Lee Vining is like a setting for a Christopher Pike novel: "a group of teens find a deadly secret among the tufas, an ancient grudge that has been waiting for new blood--It's the Return of Tufa Monster!" Or how about: "it seemed like a quiet small town, the perfect place for Jessica to recover from the loss of her mother to city violence. But soon she discovered a horrifying secret about the village of Lee Vining, and its debt to the eerie formations in the lake--could she survive to escape these mountains and Lakes of Blood??" I'm thinking something with blood sacrifice to the tufas.
A couple of truths brought home to me: 1) my car, while it can accelerate on highway 17, can't seem to increase speed if I'm at elevation. 2) I really can't sleep if there's people moving around in my space, and if I've also got my heart rate up from drinking at high altitude. Pretty sure it's the combo.
On the other hand, sleep deprivation is a good kick in the pants for my writing and my sassiness. I think I might have teased some of the guys too hard at the party, but it was pretty nice to have a comeback to almost every comment sent my way. I haven't felt this on top of my game for a couple of years now. >:D
Although I'm sure it drives people away from me, it did feel good to be able to demonstrate my smartness for once. I solved some riddles that everyone was having trouble with (although I did try to explain that it's not cause I'm that smart, it's that I've read lots of riddle books over the years and I've probably heard most of the common ones at least once), and one guy kept referring to me as Vocabulary after I correctly used "implicit" and "explicit" in the same sentence. I told him it comes from reading those thingies, you know, books, and he didn't really like that.
What was weird was unintentionally schooling the Mani-lookalike who's real name is escaping me. It was kind of nice to smack down a guy who looked so much like my old crush about his gin selection, in an unhealthy transference sort of way. :)
Sunday morning, I was still awake at 6:30am, and decided I'd had enough fun, what with the lack of sleep for two nights and how I really needed to get to a much more private bathroom soon because something unhappy was going on in my intestines that had little to do with the booze. So I was on the road, hungover and exhausted.
A tip: don't drive highway 89 if you're exhausted and hung over. but if you do, make sure to do it super early on a Sunday, because you can at least get over Monitor pass in 3rd gear becauase there's no one else on the road. I didn't notice this on the way up to Molly's, but there aren't always guard rails on a lot of the curves, and after Molly had told me a story about a local who'd just driven off the side of a mountain up by her house, I was extra scared about just going off into the abyss. Also, try to time your nausea to not kick in until you're off the pass, cause there's no place to pull over and puke until you're back down on roads that get plowed in the winter.
I was back in my own bed by 10:30am, and belatedly realized that some of the guys who showed up at the party late had actually been forest service guys who were fighting the fires up there. Which cleared up why a couple of them were married and kept mentioning their wives and trying to pimp out their friends who had gigantic biceps. Dammit, I could have totally wasted my time trying to get to know one of them, instead of hearing a drunk talk about how New Orleans is coming back together.
Oh well, no use in monday morning quarterbacking I guess.
A couple of truths brought home to me: 1) my car, while it can accelerate on highway 17, can't seem to increase speed if I'm at elevation. 2) I really can't sleep if there's people moving around in my space, and if I've also got my heart rate up from drinking at high altitude. Pretty sure it's the combo.
On the other hand, sleep deprivation is a good kick in the pants for my writing and my sassiness. I think I might have teased some of the guys too hard at the party, but it was pretty nice to have a comeback to almost every comment sent my way. I haven't felt this on top of my game for a couple of years now. >:D
Although I'm sure it drives people away from me, it did feel good to be able to demonstrate my smartness for once. I solved some riddles that everyone was having trouble with (although I did try to explain that it's not cause I'm that smart, it's that I've read lots of riddle books over the years and I've probably heard most of the common ones at least once), and one guy kept referring to me as Vocabulary after I correctly used "implicit" and "explicit" in the same sentence. I told him it comes from reading those thingies, you know, books, and he didn't really like that.
What was weird was unintentionally schooling the Mani-lookalike who's real name is escaping me. It was kind of nice to smack down a guy who looked so much like my old crush about his gin selection, in an unhealthy transference sort of way. :)
Sunday morning, I was still awake at 6:30am, and decided I'd had enough fun, what with the lack of sleep for two nights and how I really needed to get to a much more private bathroom soon because something unhappy was going on in my intestines that had little to do with the booze. So I was on the road, hungover and exhausted.
A tip: don't drive highway 89 if you're exhausted and hung over. but if you do, make sure to do it super early on a Sunday, because you can at least get over Monitor pass in 3rd gear becauase there's no one else on the road. I didn't notice this on the way up to Molly's, but there aren't always guard rails on a lot of the curves, and after Molly had told me a story about a local who'd just driven off the side of a mountain up by her house, I was extra scared about just going off into the abyss. Also, try to time your nausea to not kick in until you're off the pass, cause there's no place to pull over and puke until you're back down on roads that get plowed in the winter.
I was back in my own bed by 10:30am, and belatedly realized that some of the guys who showed up at the party late had actually been forest service guys who were fighting the fires up there. Which cleared up why a couple of them were married and kept mentioning their wives and trying to pimp out their friends who had gigantic biceps. Dammit, I could have totally wasted my time trying to get to know one of them, instead of hearing a drunk talk about how New Orleans is coming back together.
Oh well, no use in monday morning quarterbacking I guess.