Long strange trip

I guess the best things I can say about my return trip are:

1. I am now safely at home (finally)

2. It was a train, and not a bus (a real concern of mine given the Midwest flooding but apparently it hadn't seeped far enough south to affect St. Louis and southward. I expect that will change in a few more days)

But, yeah....not the most-fun vacation ever (my dad is still having ankle issues, requiring a lot of care from my mom, the procedure he was supposed to have to FIX those issues, well, the "groundbreaking, new" procedure, apparently the doctor felt it was not as advertised....and so later on, he will have the older and more invasive procedure. Which hopefully will fix it, but). I wound up not doing very much; it was kind of gray and rainy a couple days. I did do some catch-up housecleaning my mom hadn't got to because Monday one of my uncles is supposed to come for a visit....but anyway. At least I mostly didn't break my "no frivolous spending" pledge (bought a little yarn at Michael's, but that was it. And honestly, being ascetic in this way? Is not great for my mood. I'm not sure what I'm learning from this Lenten discipline other than that I really can't break away happily from the occasional frivolity)

But coming back....wow. First, the train was late. Considering it originates in Chicago and my stop is like the fourth stop on the line....that's saying something. When it finally arrived, the engineer either came in "too hot," or wasn't expecting there to be sleeper passengers, or was being crabby for some reason - he pulled ALL THE WAY forward, meaning the three of us (me and a couple getting on the same place) had to run for it, and finally walk out into the street, duck under the crossing gate. And then there was no "step box," and the entry to the train is like 2 1/2 feet off the ground. Luckily I am still fairly agile, and luckily the car attendant was a good guy and grabbed my luggage (there is no bag check through to Mineola or I'd have checked my suitcase) so I could jump up.

They probably would have saved time by making two stops, given how long it took for us to get on the sleeper. But whatever.

My dinner reservation was for 6:45. Not ideal; the car attendant offered to get me my meal on my schedule but I told him no (I didn't want to make work for him and I could wait a bit longer to eat). When I got in, the car was packed....I was at first seated with a nice woman and her 7 or so year old daughter, then one of the dining car attendants told me I had to move, they needed that space for two people (well, true, I was a solo passenger but I'd hope they'd have the whole Tetris game figured out). I wound up - womp womp - with a mom and two squabbling teenagers (at one point the boy flipped the bird at his sister. The mom didn't see, but I did, and I don't know....if my brother and I had known that gesture as kids, and done it to each other? Well, it would have taken a LOT for my dad to give one of us "a hiding," but that would have done it. But maybe some families have different attitudes...)

But, whatever. I got my meal. My car attendant (I guess he was the other good thing about the trip) made up my bed as I had asked, so I was able to lie down and read.

I finished Brian Fagan's "Cro-Magnon" (I liked it, though I wonder if Fagan went a bit far in some of his speculations....though he did make the interesting suggestion that maybe the various so-called Venus figures (the very....voluptuous....female forms) were not so much fertility images or goddess images.....but maybe they were just some guy who was good at cutting stone fooling around, kind of like how some teenaged boys today draw scantily-clad women, and....yeah....I could see that. Or that they filled the same role that "Playboy" used to fill (I think it's gone now? I think I heard it stopped printing?)

I started "Black Ships Before Troy" but couldn't get into it because there was too much slaughter, and also, unlike the Roman Britain novels, Sutcliff tries very much to get the "ancient Greek poetry" style, and so it's all very....surface....I guess you'd say. So you don't learn about characters or hear much of inner thoughts, and that was partly what endeared the character of Justin (in "The Silver Branch") to me - the fact that he was worried about disappointing his father, and he was claustrophobic, and was shy around women....

So I put that one aside, and luckily, I had another non-fiction book. Which I wound up reading in its entirety, all 250-some pages, because we wound up four hours late getting in to Mineola. I knew things were bad when I went down to breakfast at 6:30 and we hadn't been through Texarkana yet (turns out we hadn't been through Malvern yet). Most of the delays were waiting on freights.

Then, a freight broke down (they said the engine broke down, I later on heard it ran out of fuel, which, I don't know. I presume those things have fuel gauges like cars? And that it would be really kind of dumb not to fuel up at a fueling point?*)

(*Memories of the few times I took jaunts into far-western Oklahoma: you stop for gas and for a bathroom when they become available, whether or not you need them at that moment, because you don't know when the next opportunity will be)

So we had to wait, apparently, on them getting a new engine in and hauling the freight out of the way (this was not a location where there were two side-by-side tracks and an opportunity to pass....and anyway, those freights might be longer than the "passing lane" anyway).

So I read all of "Never Home Alone," a fairly new book by Rob Dunn about the small creatures (mostly microbes and arthropods) that share our homes with us. And I feel somewhat justified in being a not-very-assiduous housekeeper, now: he argues that letting the spiders stay (I usually do, except for venomous ones, and the wolf spiders get rehomed outside where they have a better chance of finding enough food). He also hints (though again, like a lot of these "layperson" books, I have no idea how much actual research back-up there is to it) that having TOO "sterile" of a house may actually contribute to autoimmune problems.....kind of like, I suppose, the fact that I wind up being anxious over stupid little things when there are no big things I am having to deal with.

He also has a neat chapter (at the end) about sourdough, and I never really thought about it but I guess I should have realized that SOURdough starter isn't just wild yeast, it's also Lactobacillus (hence the SOUR). And that different individuals wind up with different starters, which have different flavors, and when people work with them a lot....well, they wind up with Lactobacillus living on their hands, but that's a good thing...he also talks about kimchi and how it's long been known (apparently) by Korean women that different people make different-tasting kimchi, and it actually comes down to the microbiome on people's hands.

(And also, antibacterial soap is a really bad idea, but I already kind of knew that. Plain soap and water is better because it just removes the surface - likely pathogenic- bacteria without disrupting the existing "carpet" of bacteria on the skin, which are almost entirely neutral-to-beneficial).

One thing he does, which most people writing "pop science" do, and that annoys me - he embeds jokes in the text and sometimes I can't tell (because I am both literal minded and given to being suspicious) if some of the more outlandish claims are jokes or true. (And you have to be careful about joking about things - my old systematic botany  prof once noted with dismay he had joked about wild ginger (Asarum) being pollinated by box turtles, because he later heard some Garden Club-type excitedly telling her friends, "And Dr. Warren H. Wagner of the University of Michigan says they are pollinated by box turtles" and he said there was no gracious way to correct her....)

But generally, I enjoyed the book. (I'll return to the Homeric re-tellings at some point, it's just, I find some times - when news of the world is getting to me or I am stressed - anything with any amount of violence is too much)

But yeah. We were four hours late getting in to Mineola. It was 5 pm by the time I got home here. I did cancel Sunday school for tomorrow - I am just too wiped out to write a lesson now. I've washed my hair and in a few minutes I will put away my (clean) clothes (one good thing about visiting family is that you can do laundry before leaving for home) and just make an early night.

Tomorrow I have to clean my house, I guess. Piano lessons start Thursday and I expect this week to be packed - I have to evaluate two sets of scholarship applicants and also the applicants for the job.