That's all I can say at the end of a wild, wild week that took me to Lubbock, Dallas, home, Austin, and home again. Which is one heck of a lot of driving, even in Texas, with gas topping $3.89 for most of the trip. I blessed Nancy, our little low-mileage Honda Civic, although she disgraced herself by picking up a nail in her right rear tire in Goldthwaite (which claims to be the mistletoe capital of the world, and I don't doubt it). I hung around for an hour while the good guys at the Ford dealership fixed the tire. Funny thing (but not funny ha-ha): this was a virgin tire, a replacement for the one that picked up a nail in Muleshoe on Bill's last trip to New Mexico. Virgin no longer. Who's dropping all these nails on Texas roads?
In Lubbock on Tuesday, I talked to a goodly group of China's best friends at the Special Collections library. In Dallas on Wednesday, I got to spend the afternoon with my favorite high school English teacher, whom I hadn't seen for more decades than I care to tell you. On Thursday, I was one of several speakers at the Arboretum. Unfortunately, I followed the speaker who showed slides of Ted Turner's million-acre ranch, Cher's gilded Hollywood palace, and the airplanes John Travolta parks in his garden--and hence felt a little out of my league, talking about plain old rosemary and sage. Today in Austin, at the Texas Book Festival, I talked about What Wildness is This (more generally, about Western women writers) on a panel with Janis Stout and Elizabeth Crook. If you're thinking that I'm probably glad to be back home safe with nothing worse than a sore throat and a nail in Nancy's tire, I'd say you're right. Somebody get me a gin. And remind me, the next time I'm tempted to agree to drive 1200 miles for three events, to just. say. no.
But tomorrow (today, if you're reading this on Monday) I'm off again--virtually, this time, which is definitely a lot easier on the gas tank and tires. The blog tour schedule is here. I hope you're coming along, and that you'll enter every drawing. (Hey. You're just as likely as the next person to win that book.) So bring your coffee (or tea or gin or whatever) and come along. This blog tour is a new thing for me, and I'd just as soon not do it all by my lonesome.
More later, after I've finished the laundry and swept a few buckets of dog fur off the floor.
Reading note. Remember the Texas state motto: Too Much Is Not Enough, and Wretched Excess Is Even More Fun.--Molly Ivins