relaxedKelli's son, Shane, is expecting his first child in the next few weeks. (The baby is now expected to arrive while I'm in Europe. Kelli wanted to give the mother a rocking chair, after confirming that they didn't have one. So after lunch, we came back to my hotel (Kelli was impressed by the suite), and we looked at various kinds of likely rocking chairs online, picked one out, confirmed that Shane was up to assembling it, and I ordered and paid for it. It should arrive about the time I leave for Ireland.
By then it was time for Kelli to get back to the facility, as we'd not taken the extra medications and whatnot that we need for any longer excursion. We checked her back in, returned the empty oxygen bottles, and Kelli went to play bingo while I ran one more errand for her. I brought back the things she requested, gave her a hug (between games), and promised that we'd stop by (briefly) on our way to the Bay Area next weekend on the first leg of our Worldcon trip.
We were relatively fortunate today that the weather wasn't nearly as blisteringly hot as it's possible to be in a Sacramento summer, but it was still 35°C or so. It wasn't as bad as it could have been as long as you stayed in the shade. I was very fortunate in mostly finding places I could park that were shaded, after unloading Kelli and her wheelchair and getting her out of the sun. (Working with the people at the nursing home, Kelli says that by the next time we do one of these trips, she should have a DMV placard to allow the people driving her places to use the handicapped-accessible parking spaces. Today, I briefly used such spaces without a placard to get Kelli in/out of my van, moving the Astro to a regular space after doing so.)
It was a nice day, but I was surprisingly tired afterwards. I came back to the hotel, collapsed onto the sofa for a while and cooled off, then went and got some take-out food for an early dinner.
Some joker who used this hotel room previously turned the cooling on the mini-fridge all the way up to maximum, so the milk and sodas that I bought yesterday were nearly frozen solid when I got back to the room. I turned the dial back to a more ordinary setting and thawed out my drinks to have with my dinner.
Later today, I expect to take advantage of the hot tub for a second night. I never have time for that sort of thing on convention travel, so it's nice when I get a chance to lay out and soak. Tomorrow morning I head for home. I'm glad that I didn't decide to cut corners and skip the second hotel night. Not only did it make it possible for us to buy the rocking chair, but I would have been an unhappy driver tying to get home this afternoon. Furthermore, the rest areas at Gold Run are now closed for maintenance, so I would not have even had the easy location to stop and lay up, even if I had driven the RV, which I did not. Instead, I've got Giants baseball playing on the computer and I'm taking it easy. It's the calm before the storm, which starts next weekend for Lisa and I, but has already begun for many of my friends who are either in transit or already in Ireland.
