Recipes to die for.

Read this in The Week, one of my two favorite magazines, for August 15:

British celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson said in a magazine article that “the weed henbane is great in salads.” Thompson later said he had confused henbane with a different plant that does not cause convulsions, vomiting, and death.

Think what he really wanted in his salad was rue?

Summer fun.

There's nothing better than the three weeks of summer we get here in Seattle. It was a perfect day today. Highs were in the mid-80s, but you could always catch a breeze. I had that lunch with a coworker that I mentioned yesterday . . . and we sat outdoors.

Tonight I went to my first dragon boat practice in three months. It is an exercise in public humiliation for me. But it feels so good when I stop. The "endolphins" are what make me do it.

Plus, it's a cheap way to get out on the water on a beautiful day!

Ya load sixteen tons and whaddya get?

This working thing cuts right through the middle of your day.

I'm exhausted! No siesta today.

I have to admit that it's fun to get to go to a new work space. And I like the idea of working downtown, but I haven't had a chance to get out at all. It's energizing to be in a different place. Still just settling in. Tomorrow I'm going out to lunch with a coworker, so that will feel a little more like I'm actually in Seattle. Do you know that I haven't even looked at my car yet? Ross says he saw it in the driveway, so I know it's here somewhere.

Ross got a lot of unpacking done. I haven't been at all productive at home. I'm just hoping I have enough work clothes available to make it through the week.

Back to school.

Today was like freshman year of high school. I'm in a new school . . . and I only know half my classmates. (Where's my homeroom? Is this French 101?) Plus, I took the bus. At least in high school, you know the stop where you should get off. And you don't have to ask how to pay.

I could at least tell I had been missed. I started meetings at around 9:30 and by noon had more work than I could possibly get done by the deadlines.

"Welcome back. You're late."

I'm pretty sure I'm going to have dreams about going to my final exams and realizing I hadn't attended class the whole semester.

Sea level.

We made it back! We arrived around 4:30 p.m.

Today we started in Montana, cut through the panhandle of Idaho and took the long tour of the great state of Washington. We saw lots of wonderful scenery. I think Western Washington is the prettiest part of the world. In August. In the sunshine.

The house looks lighter and brighter than I remember it. Possibly it's that August sunshine effect. Or maybe it's that some our stuff is still hidden in closets. Todd and Linda took great care of the place. My mail was even sorted! It took me 15 minutes to look through it. Normally, after being gone a couple of weeks, it takes three days. What a wonderful thing.

The dogs are resting between bouts of sniffing everything. I can imagine them thinking, "This place looks familiar, but it sure smells different. Is that cat?!?"

I'm doing a little laundry so I'll have something appropriate to wear to work tomorrow. Hmmm. Real clothes, not stretchy yoga pants. Real shoes, not flip-flops. Makeup.

Now I remember why I want to work at home.

I'll be seeing most of the folks who read this blog in real life soon -- so I don't know if I'll keep writing. If I do, I won't be hurt if you don't want to check in on it anymore. As long as we continue to check in with each other, I'm fine with that.

Maybe more than a mile high.

This was the fastest, easiest day yet. We're in Bozeman. It's probably a very nice city. It's a university town, isn't it? But we're at a Best Western just off the freeway . . . so we don't know. That's okay. Just happy to be here.

We took I-25 to I-90 . . . so we really must be on the home stretch. I-90 starts (or ends?) in Seattle. We saw the beginning of I-94 during the drive today. I'm sentimental. I waved to it.

Wyoming, from I-25 anyway, is more interesting than, say, Kansas . . . but stick it between Colorado and Montana and it suffers by comparison. Most of it looks completely uninhabited. I always heard that Montana had the lowest population density of any state -- but, along our route, it's got farmland anyway. Wyoming had not much.

What was very fun were (was?) the silhouettes. In Mexico, there's a (relatively) common billboard that's a cutout of an ENORMOUS bull. You see it at the top of a hill from miles away and think . . . whoa! That's big. In Wyoming, we saw a buffalo. (Um-hmmmm.) Then a cowboy on a horse. (Huh!) Then the Indian on a horse. (Awww.) Then a jackalope. (Hahahhaha!) Then a triceratops. (HAH!) A state with very few people and a big sense of humor.

Okay. I'm done with parentheses for this post.

Tomorrow, we'll be home!

Mile high.

We're in a Sheraton in Denver now. We started a little late. We drove north from Las Cruces through Albuquerque (ugly) to Santa Fe (looks kinda new) and then took a detour up through Taos. Neither of us had been there. What a pretty drive. Pretty town, too. You have to really like beige. Okay, that was sarcastic Carolyn. Down, girl.

The Sheraton is probably nicer than last night's hotel . . . but it's HUGE. The hotel last night felt a little homier. And, of course, we got to know the waiter guy quite well. The woman who brought room service tonight was very nice as well -- but she didn't come to our room three times because our power was out. She used to have a dog. A boxer.

The dogs were great again today. It's amazing how riding in the truck all day wears them out as much as it does us.

So far we've been through nine states . . . Colorado, New Mexico, a tiny corner of Texas, Chihuahua, Aguascalientes, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango and Zaragoza -- not necessarily in that order. I've never been to Wyoming or Montana. That's tomorrow.