beeehave

This past week was a whirlwind, so it is no surprise that I am not feeling my best today, and that's ok.  Jerry and I had one of the quickest trips I think we've ever attempted and I am pretty sure it's the last one like that we will think of doing.  Back in May 2015, we drove from Portland, Oregon to Starkville, Mississippi in four days~~which is not a huge heaping lot but given that I like to enjoy my trips, it was incredibly quick for me.  But this week, we had a deal that was too good to pass up so we pulled off a faster stunt than that and I'm oddly proud of it and also somewhat ashamed because I ended up paying with a compromised immune system that led to a sinus infection that is now moving into my chest and setting up fires as well as explosive flares.  But!  It's not the flu and I did nip it in the bud.  yea! me.

And yea! to my awesome husband, who totally rocks my world.

Last week, I found out that my cousin who owns Mountainside Pottery in Pennsylvania was selling her two kilns and accessories, for an amazingly cheap price.  Since the weather turned to freezing here in Mississippi last week as well, I was pretty sure it would be freezing in PA.  The kilns were under tarps but sitting outside so I wanted to get them out of the weather as quickly as I could.  So we began to make arrangements to get them.

Thing is, I also had some appointments that I was able to rearrange but there were a few that I could not, so we were going to have a tight turn around with no time to visit anyone.  So, we pulled off a 2500 mile trip in three days.  It was good, but exhausting.  And we did exactly what we wanted, we borrowed Jerry's eldest son's truck from the gulf coast, drove up to PA, loaded the kilns, drove back to the coast, returned the truck and left the kilns with Jerry II, picked up our car, and drove home.  In three days.

Why did I want the kilns in the first place?  Jerry's son Jerry does wonderful pottery, winning the coveted Chalet prize for his senior thesis a few years back.  Life often throws curve balls and sometimes we are so busy fielding them that we put other important stuff on the back burner because there is even more important stuff to attend to:  priorities, man, priorities.  Kilns generally don't perish, so when he gets around to being creative with clay again, he'll have some tools at his disposal.

There were a few funnies on the trip, including this one:

Most of the trip, Jerry drove.  But while in Columbia County, Pennsylvania I drove.  Jerry figured rightly that I would know where I was going and have a better chance of getting us there.  Besides, it left him free to gawk at all the sights to see.  So he's oooh'ing and ahhh'ing over the tail end of the fall foliage, enjoying the backass country roads, paved and unpaved, lined and unlined; when suddenly he exclaims, "wow!  Look at that, I have never seen that many beehives in one place!!  Ever."  So I glance over, see what he's pointing at, and then glance back at the road and slow down even more.  We are now crawling along; the occasional person passing us {driving} or whom we are passing {farmers in fields} probably think we are with PennDOT, eyeing the roads for the upcoming winter weather of snow, ice, sleet, etc.  I mean, we were in a bright yellow vehicle like the road crews in PA use.

Jerry realizes my face is a bit...off.  "Uhm, what?" I say, not sure I understood exactly what he meant.  "Over there, those white boxes, they're beehives....right?"  I'm wondering why he would think that, and also how to tell him that no, those are not beehives, when he starts laughing, "oh, shit, that's a graveyard, that's a church...those are grave markers."

Why, yes, those ARE headstones.

My mom would have loved it.