• Amalah
• Ampersand
• Cowgirl Funk
• Cut the Crap
• A Damn Thing
• Fly in the Honey
• From the Mind of the Dawnie
• Hannah Cooks
• Hannah Talks
• Hashai
• Hate Your Daddy
• Hussified
• Invinciblegirl
• JournalCon 2004
• Journey of a Girl
• Kiss My Grits
• Les-Cadeaux
• Meegor
• Nearly There
• The Nuthouse
• Pineapple Girl
• The Rage Diaries
• The Random Muse
• SkinnyKat
• That Something
• What Does a Girl Do?

I stayed at T’s place on Wednesday night since I wasn’t going to see him for nearly a month, and I helped him pack and get ready for his trip. He flew out of St. Louis and will be back in early May. I’m trying not to think about him while he’s gone and I’m planning to meet him in St. Louis when he returns and then I’ll bring him back to Kansas City.

Anyway. We woke up later than planned on Thursday, so I made it to Illinois in time for dinner on Thursday night and we enjoyed a Seder meal of Taco Bell gorditas and diet sodas before heading to church. My mom accompanies the choir and I offered to go with her so that she wouldn’t have to travel by herself. (I should note that I grew up in a town about 45 minutes away from where my parents currently reside, and they still – sporadically – attend church in my hometown.)

Friday, my mom and I got up early and went to visit my grandpa in his retirement community. We sang 80’s pop songs really loud in the car on the way there and talked about relationships and careers and family and friends and spent some time not talking at all and that was nice too. Eight hours round-trip in a car with my mom used to be my idea of torture, but I’ll remember that alone time with her for a long, long time. As crazy as she can be, the woman is very wise. Anyway, we spent a few hours with her dad and then went out for ice cream and instead of getting fat-free fruity nasty faux-sugar sorbet, I ordered a scoop of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream in a bigass waffle cone and and let me tell you, I enjoyed the hell out of that ice cream. We made it home around 8 p.m. and hung out with my dad for a few minutes, and my sister Punk arrived home from school right after we got there, so we ordered pizza and played Clue and then played cards with my brother Scoot and his girlfriend Spaz.

Saturday, Spaz and Scoot slept late and the rest of us got up early and went to a flea market down the road from my parents’ house. It was a ton of fun – I bought an antique glass pitcher and four matching juice glasses for a total of $3, some mismatched vintage glass pieces, some vintage cookbooks for my upcoming kitchen wall art project, and a lovely beaded bracelet as a gift for a friend’s upcoming birthday. I love old stuff.

Sunday morning, we were all up before 5 a.m. because my mom talked us into going to the sunrise service at church in our hometown, which is 45 minutes away from where they currently live. The sunrise service at 7 o’clock in the goddamn morning, that is. I don’t usually get up before 7 a.m. to go to my job, much less show up somewhere at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Anyway, we were tired and cranky, but we went to church and went to the breakfast and cooed at lots of babies and admired the pretty dresses and cute little boy suits on the kids and then Punk took off to go back to Wisconsin and the rest of us schlepped back home and went back to bed.

Today, I got up early and drove Scoot back to school (his school is on my way home, so holiday vacations usually work out such that my parents don’t have to drive him back), and we ate McDonald’s for breakfast and listened to NPR and talked about what we were going to do with our lives. And, I told him that I would try to like Spaz and he told me that he didn’t want to see me hurt by T and we laughed so much that my sides still hurt a little. My brother is, hands down, the funniest person I know, and I am so proud of him that I have no words to describe that feeling adequately. He’s an incredible guy and I look at him sometimes and see a three year-old in corduroy pants from Osh Kosh B’Gosh and Velcro shoes and a bowl cut, and he has chubby cheeks and dimples. Now I see a man who will be twenty next week, with pants from Brooks Brothers and shiny dress shoes and a grown-up’s haircut, and now he shaves and drives and is a sophomore in college.

I love to travel, but at times, I absolutely dread coming home. The mailbox is always overflowing with bills, my in-box is always nearly full of e-mail, and there is no food in the apartment. I usually clean the place before I leave town, so it’s nice to come home to empty trash cans and freshly vacuumed carpets, but I also usually bring back a suitcase full of dirty laundry and I’m so tired from traveling and being constantly on the go for several days that I have no desire to put anything away or do anything productive. This time feels different, though, because I had such a good time with my family – nobody was fighting, nobody was angry, and we were all so happy to see each other that we had a hard time saying good-bye. And, this trip was exactly the motivation I needed to start getting serious about moving closer to home – because that’s exactly where I want to be and right now, I feel so very far away.