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| In Which A Lot Has Happened! |
This past week has been quite the marathon of action! My guy had his birthday, my family went on a trip, and we had a major household mechanical failure! All in the last seven days!
On Wednesday, my guy and I went out with some friends to celebrate his birthday and had a magnificent feast. It was a blast, and I loved every minute of it! 10/10 would do again lol.
On Friday, we had a wonderful time hanging out, watching YouTube together and planning out the next day's Family Trip to Boston. We parted ways and I stayed up all night anxious for our trip.
Why was I anxious? Because every single time I've been on a family trip, something always goes wrong. Usually someone throws up, has a meltdown, and/or gets lost, or something we were supposed to do fails or isn't actually as fun as we'd hoped.
So of course it starts with someone getting sick and not being able to come at all, leaving two party members without a ride. That was handled with my dad going to get them (yay!) and finding out on the road that his car desperately needs oil when we're running 10 minutes behind (not yay!).
We make it to the train station. Everything's cramped, I don't do well with crowds, and there's no one at the ticket counter. No worries, the tickets were purchased online! My dad printed them out and handed them out to... most of us.
One of our groups hadn't arrived yet - including the person who the trip was planned for, my eldest nibling. They were running late.
Thankfully, so was the train, so when they arrived 2 minutes before our train was originally supposed to depart, there was still a 20 minute delay. In the train's defense, it had dumped almost a foot of snow on the track in places. In my family's defense, it's hard to get young kids up and at em on a Saturday morning!
Boarding was just as stressful as I feared - since Amtrak doesn't do assigned seating in Coach, we kind of had to fend for ourselves, and the train was 100% sold out, so there was absolutely zero room for error. My boyfriend and I ended up staying in the first car we boarded while everyone else ended up in another car.
It turns out that their car had absolutely no intercom, so they didn't hear any of the stops and had no idea that we'd had to slow down at one point because the storm knocked out the signal from Amtrak to our train. They also didn't know that, due to our delay, we'd had to stop in the middle of nowhere for another train to pass us, since we were on a double track heading into a single track.
We were a full hour late to North Station in Boston, which was also stressful, but the worst stress for me was worrying if we were going to try to corral 3 kids and a herd of cat-independent adults onto the subway. Thankfully we decided to walk instead of trying to cram 7 people onto a subway at once. And I'm so glad we walked!
We trotted past the Charles River and said hello to some very unimpressed Canada Geese who were napping or strolling around in that area. The traffic was slow and sporadic at 11AM, and we were able to walk all the way to the Museum of Science easily! And once we were there, my younger sibling was able to handle our tickets and got us all in and stamped - mine was a lightning bolt. From there, we got a quick lunch in the cafe (I recommend the chicken tenders, but not the onion rings) and dispersed into the museum to roam in small groups until we'd meet back up at the planetarium for the show (which costs extra but is worth every penny).
My guy and I wandered around, taking in the Live Animal Care area (where we both cooed at the adorable lop-eared rabbit, Pancake, who was taking a nap in the corner of the exercise cage, and then I babbled endlessly about my love of Chuckwallas and Legless Lizards), the glory and majesty of the enormous fiberglass t-rex statue (clad in a comedically enormous custom scarf), and the awe-inspiring and fully articulated fossilized Cliff the Triceratops. Then I made a confession to him.
See... I have been to the Boston Museum of Science once before. And it traumatized me. Because I was very young and perhaps in the 1990s, the safety standards of the Lightning Show were a bit laxer and there were no warnings and also my parents loved to give me shit for being scared of things.
So watching someone intentionally electrify a cage they were sitting in while I sat in the dark (which I was already afraid of) and there was so much noise (which overwhelmed me) and the lightning was so bright...
It was maybe fully terrifying to Very Young Me.
And I figured, it's been more than 20 years. I should probably get over this.
And what better way to get over your phobia of lightning triggered by a lightning show than by watching that lightning show once more?
If you've never been to the Boston Museum of Science, they have a theater that was built around the largest Van de Graf Generator in the world. It was built in the 1930s to smash freaking atoms. It looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. It's HUGE. And it's gorgeous.
The theater has 3 levels accessible to all 3 floors of the Blue Wing, and it's packed by 15 minutes before the lightning shows. If you want to go there, go early, find a spot, and park yourself.
When I was a kid, they didn't have the lights on at all. You had one tiny spotlight on the museum employee who was controlling the Tesla Coils and the Van de Graf Generator. They didn't warn you when they were going to set off the sparks. It just... happened. Loudly and in the dark.
Now, your host (ours was Megan, who was wonderful) will introduce you, with all the lights on, to each part of the set and explain (along with lightning safety) what they're about to do. When they're about to do something, they'll tell you, they'll dim the lights only when they're about to bring on the lightning. And honestly? It was a restorative experience.
It was also FREAKING AWESOME!!!! I hope I can go again!
Am I still scared of lightning? Oh, absolutely. To me lightning is no different than a bear or a volcano - I can't stop it, it'll kill me if it catches me, and it's really freaking cool.
After the Lightning Show, we explored a bit more, bought a bunch of water from the vending machines (which apparently belong to Wolfgang Puck?), and eventually met back up with everyone to go to the planetarium.
You go into a flying saucer-shaped room with a domed ceiling, settle into an unfairly comfortable chair, and a pair of sweet, funny museum employees will take you to the edge of the known universe while any small children in the room (and there will be a LOT, and they will be insanely adorable) lose their funny little minds.
I cannot explain the experience any better than this: It's a Ms Frizzle Field Trip without the peril.
It was worth every penny.
After the planetarium, we all took a final bathroom break, collected our things, and trotted back to the station.
The geese had all gone to bed, there was far more traffic, and I'm pretty sure we nearly lost half of our group because the front half was walking at 95 miles per hour, but there was a hawk in a tree on the way back, and there were pigeons in the station and it was just so much fun that it's impossible to complain.
Now the stress came back - we were going to have to get back on the train, and it wasn't late this time. We didn't have time to get dinner in the station, though we were considering it. Instead, we all bunched together at the doors to our Gate, and when we were given the Go Ahead, we surged towards the train. Some of us were better at surging than others, and I had to apologize to one of my niblings for nearly trampling her in my clumsy haste. We still ended up all together, and there were no delays on our return home aboard an also-sold-out train!
So obviously my panic was over nothing. We had a fantastic trip, we enjoyed ourselves, and aside from some minor logistical hiccups, it was awesome.
And then we got home.
I brushed my teeth, went to bed.
And woke up to a home with no hot water because apparently it broke at some point while I was trying to wash my face on Saturday night. Dandy.
Sunday was spent trying to get a water heater.
Yesterday, we picked up the heater and it took three people to get it inside and down into the basement. I am intensely grateful to whoever invented the Forearm Forklift because that damn thing weighed a lot. It was very unwieldy getting it through the shin-deep snow and into my cellar down a steep ramp we hastily added. I did lose my footing on the ramp as we were sliding the water heater down, so once it was out of the way, I let myself slide down behind it, which was actually pretty fun. Maneuvering it into place? Less fun.
I was basically useless once the heater was oriented correctly, and aside from pointing out where some pipes and wires terminated, I was pretty redundant, so I scampered upstairs to wait for hot water. Which took until this morning.
I had to wait from Friday morning to today in order to get properly bathed lol. As you might imagine, that first shower was heavenly.
Now, as for my other work - I haven't managed to draw since last Thursday, sadly. I plan to try to sketch something tonight, but we'll see if that's just idle want or if I can actually do it. I'm over 3k words into my manuscript right now, though, and I even managed to write on Saturday night!!!
Since last week alone I've written 810 words. Today's count was 113. I'm pretty dang pleased, to be honest. Heck, I've finished one chapter and part of the next!
As for the rest of this week, I hope to continue writing every night, and maybe I'll even draw! If you want a say in what I do end up drawing, feel free to hit up my Ko-Fi account in the sidebar and send me a coffee with a message telling me what category you'd like to see - Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Dedbert, Location, Geometric, or Word.
For now, I am going to finish this last cup of coffee (decaf) and try to figure out how to draw something.
FC
