Far over the Misty Mountains...
To dungeons deep and caverns old,
We must away, ere break of day,
To seek our pale enchanted gold.
I played the hobbit Dwalin in a 1993 high school production of "The Hobbit," and I think of this stanza when I see mist over the mountains here in Utah. (Is it geeky to know it by heart and repeat it to no end in my head?) In the play, the whole hobbiting troupe of adventurers repeated it during an exeunt with fade to black. The full poem is longer in the book. This photo is a zoomed image taken from our backyard after the first snows appeared.
I'm back in the West now. The trip to Ohio went well. Effective communication astonishly occurred between me and my mother and between Ben and both of his parents. Ben wished he had spent less time fixing his sister's computer while we were there, but I know that she was happy just to see him again... and during my shorter time with her, I feel like we connected more than we have before. We all had a nice lunch at the Olive Garden on Sunday... me, Ben, my mom, Ben's mom, Ben's sister and his sister's friend instead of Ben's dad. Ben and his sister forgot to tell their mother what time to be there, though, so there was a lot of apologizing when she finally arrived.
We also spent almost three hours visiting Ben's grandparents, which we skipped last year while we were in town. I'm so glad that we went. We brought them fresh flowers (Grandma later told Ben's dad over the phone to save money and just bring short stem carnations next time, and only one... even though we'd only spent $11 for the fresh bouquet from a local nursery). Grandpa has had a couple strokes recently, but was doing way better than my step-grandmother had even 5 years after her stroke at a much younger age. Having asked my own grandparents about their family histories before they died, and being thankful that I did, I worked in a question or two that led to me and Ben learning more about his family history than he had previously known. That was cool, and Grandpa was more than happy to share what he knew... and both he and Grandma were impressed with how much he actually recalled.
Great, now I have two sides of family history to research, though I think a lot more of my own family history is recorded than Ben's. And Ben will probably be more interested in helping with the detective work of his own family.
I came down with a cold while I was in Ohio and I'm still feeling it. WTF? I rarely get sick and I've been sick with a cold three times in the past 6 months or so.
