Fifteen minutes from now, I’ll be on a plane back to Seattle. But right now I’m sitting in the Vegas airport, listening to the endless burbling of slot machines rolling their virtual wheels. I almost dropped a buck in one of them when I was getting a drink – the back of my head really thought that one lonely “Alien” machine among all the “Wheel of Fortune” slots was about to pay out, or something – but didn’t even bother looking to see if I had enough quarters on me.
Not that I didn’t have a windfall anyway; one thing I did during my trip to see my mother was to go out to a bank in Gretna, where I dealt with even MORE investments my grandmother left me. Enough to put off getting a “real job” by a few more years; hopefully I’ll get this “small press creator” thing off the ground before then.
I think the main thing I gave my mother was her library back. Ever since she moved into her current apartment, her books have been a total jumble, just thrown onto the shelves with no order. She’s getting old and just doesn’t have the strength needed for a day or three of re-ordering the books (especially with having to crouch to deal with lower shelves), so it had stayed that way. But earlier this week, I started pulling books off the shelves and putting them in piles based on sections (well, mostly handing them to her, whereupon she made the section call), then putting them all back on the shelves. There’s still ordering to be done within the sections, but it already looks a lot more ordered – there’s lots of sets of multiple related volumes shelved next to each other now. We also got rid of a decent chunk of stuff, so she’ll have room to expand that felt lacking before.
It all had to happen in a day because I was sleeping in the library, on a folded-out bed. The stacks of books on the floor kinda meant I couldn’t fold the bed out until the books were out of the way! The fiction’s not really done; I only loosely alphabetized by first letter, and that only up to about half of the Gs.
It was good to spend time with her, but I’m going to be glad to get back to my own bed, and my studio. Where I think my main task for tomorrow is going to be trying to sign, draw in, and send out some more Rita books.
I should also see if there are any end-of-the-world parties coming up…