Another summer week

This was our last full week with Rocket Boy, so I'm feeling kind of down. He flies back to St. Louis on Tuesday. But there are good reasons why he needs to go back now. He needs to get started on his lymphedema treatment there, though I wish he were doing it here. He did finally go to his doctor here (he has primary care physicians in both St. Louis and Boulder), who wants him to talk to a vascular surgeon in Denver. Well, maybe sometime in the future.

In any case, I've got a full week ahead, with my surgery on Friday, my sister arriving Thursday, Rocket Boy to take to the airport on Tuesday, and all the last minute things to do on Monday before he leaves, plus shopping and cleaning on Wednesday and Thursday. Ugh, it just sounds like a week to survive. I'm tired, thinking about it. After my surgery, though, I should start to feel less tired. That's the goal, anyway, or the promise, or the hope. But just in case it takes me a while to recover, I feel like I need to have the cupboards full of easy to make food. I don't know, I don't know.

So this past week was better than that, I guess. We kicked off the week with a short vacation. We drove to the cabin on Sunday, stopping off at the Cutthroat Cafe in Bailey for lunch, as usual, and spent a couple of hours puttering around. Rocket Boy put up another shelf, as he likes to do. 

Sometimes when I can't sleep I think about all the things that are stowed at the cabin that I will have to remove if RB predeceases me and I decide to sell. I lie in bed and try to figure out how I would do it: rent a U-haul? Pay someone in Alma to empty the place and drive the stuff to Boulder? And then what do I do with the stuff? Rent a storage locker for it? Or maybe I could go up and just get the stuff I want (old toys, photos), and then sell the property with the rest of the stuff in it? I seriously have wasted many late night hours worrying about this. The cabin is not my friend.

Then we drove on to Salida, where we spent the night in a reasonably nice hotel (Salida Inn & Monarch Suites, something like that). It had a pool and hot tub, which we made use of, and our room had THREE queen beds! I've never seen a hotel room with three queen beds. It was perfect for our needs -- I mean, one queen and two singles would have been perfect too, but the point was, THREE beds! Nobody even had to sleep on a pull-out sofa.

The downside of our hotel was that Teen A managed to fall down the concrete stairs and hurt his ankle. It was totally his fault -- he was trying to get ahead of slow, fat me, and lost his balance. But it was scary to watch him tumble. Fortunately his ankle wasn't badly hurt, and we didn't have to go to Urgent Care.

We didn't actually have a very good time in Salida. I think it was a combination of lingering covid-related problems, too many people trying to have fun and not enough people working, the twins' lack of interest in what RB and I were interested in, and the icky sky. Both Sunday and Monday, in Boulder and Alma and Salida and Canon City and Colorado Springs and Denver, the sky was hazy -- from smoke from fires in Oregon and such. I really missed the beautiful blue Colorado skies.

We had a terrible time finding a place to eat on Sunday night, but finally had OK pizza at the Moonlight Pizza & Brewpub. The next morning we ate a decent breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and went looking for the road to the Salida crater, site of a memorable hike that RB and I took together about a year before we were married. But we hadn't done our research and we couldn't find it. We finally just went to a lovely park beside the Arkansas River and hung out there for a while. This was totally fine with the kids, who did not want to hike anywhere anyway.

Then we had planned to swim at the hot springs pool, where we had swum before -- and had the pool mostly to ourselves. But that was probably on a weekend. This time when we went it was Monday morning and the pool was closed for swim lessons! Oh well...

We gave up on Salida and started driving toward Canon City, where we planned to have lunch. Rocket Boy wanted to eat at Mr. Ed's, site of a memorable dinner we ate with his dad, the first time I met his dad. But it has flaky hours and was closed (even though the sign giving the hours said it should be open). Whatever. We went to Village Inn instead, which made me happy. After vi, we went to Walmart, because Teen B had broken a wire on his braces and we hadn't brought any wax with us. The Safeway in Salida didn't have wax, but the Walmart in Canon City did.

After Walmart, we headed back to Boulder, but it's a long drive, and we did make a few more stops. One stop was special. On the drive between Canon City and Colorado Springs, close to the Springs, there is a sign for the May Natural History Museum (with a statue of a giant bug) that we had seen dozens of times but never stopped for. This time we stopped, because Rocket Boy said it was a bucket list item for him. That freaked me out slightly -- he seemed to be acknowledging that he doesn't have all the time in the world left. But of course he's right. I was imagining us going back to Salida and Canon City someday without the twins, but when would that be, really?

Anyway, the museum shares a building with an RV campsite (both owned by the May family), and when we were there, everyone else there was trying to get a campsite. But we paid a (rather high) fee to go to the museum. First we watched a video in this funky little room.

Then we went on into the actual museum. And although it's kind of hokey and jury-rigged, it's also very cool. It consists of many large glass cases full of butterflies, spiders, or just plain bugs. They are all part of the collection of the museum's founder, James May. I was going to put a photo of a spider case here, but I don't want to scare anyone. The bug cases were just as scary, with gigantic insects collected in places like Borneo and Thailand. No insects should be allowed to be as big as the ones in those cases. But the butterflies, of course, were beautiful. 

Then we drove home to Boulder, and it was awful, but Rocket Boy drove that part (I had done all the other driving, but I was tired). At one point we both estimated what time we would get home: I guessed 7:15 and he guessed 6:40. And we got home at 6:41. That man, I swear. Sometimes it seems like he has no sense of time, and then this.

I don't remember what we did the rest of the week -- recuperated, worked, cleaned, shopped, cooked, all that stuff. I took Teen B to an emergency orthodontia appointment on Tuesday, while RB and Teen A got their hair cut. RB took the kids to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science on Friday night (I begged off, too tired), and swimming on Saturday afternoon (I begged off again). Today we mostly cleaned (RB finally worked on the files, making it possible for me to continue after he leaves), I got my pre-surgery Covid test, and tomorrow he's promised the boys a trip to play mini golf. And then that's it -- he flies back Tuesday, and his flight leaves at 11 am, so we'll have to be up and out the door early, by 8 am probably. Lovely, rush hour traffic. 

Well, it's been a pretty good visit and I'm glad he's going back to have his lymphedema treatment. And I wish he wasn't going back. I wish he could stay longer, and I wish he could come back in the fall and stay a long time. If wishes were horses...