Heading Home

I headed home Tuesday from Pennsylvania, passing through Pittsburgh to see Oldest Son again for lunch. I stopped off for the evening in Richmond, Indiana. The weather was iffy going into the trip; eastern Pennsylvania got five or so inches of snow Sunday and it turned bitter cold across the upper Midwest, dropping into the high (low?) negatives.
First Leg Observations
Passing through the Laurel Highlands area around mile marker 99. The trees are gorgeous because there’s so much snow trapped in the upper branches. I couldn’t find anywhere to stop to get any good pictures and I don’t know that a moving photo would have captured it really well. I also found it interesting to see the many drift patterns in the snow alongside the turnpike. There were plenty of places where drift patterns had developed for no apparent reason.
Only saw one Trump vehicle on its way west from the inauguration, covered with “Inauguration Or Bust” and Trump-Vance stickers and so forth. I was happy to see that most of the flags in Pennsylvania—maybe all of the flags—are still at half-staff. I know Speaker Mike Johnson ordered Capitol flags back to full staff for the inauguration, but I’m not clear the SOTH has the authority to countermand an order from POTUS. Do we really want to go down that road?
One thing I noted in the news coverage of Trump’s wishes to have the flags raised back to full staff is that he used the phrase “half-mast.” A lot of the coverage made a big deal about that being a term used in the Navy and that the proper term for land-based flags was “half-staff” and I didn’t understand the reasoning behind making that distinction. Yes, it’s technically an error. But it’s a common one across the citizenry, and I don’t know that it really makes a difference in the end.
I note too that a lot of news outlets will write that soldiers received a 21-gun salute at their funeral. That’s just as incorrect. It’s three rifle volleys, not a 21-gun salute. The latter is reserved for heads of state and so forth. So it seems quite hypocritical to me to make a big deal about the president using the wrong phrase when the news outlet makes a similar error.
I stopped off in Pittsburgh and had lunch with Oldest Son at Fox’s Den. Caught him up on what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. It was good to see him even if it was just for like half an hour.
The weather was good for the first part of the trip. I hit snow around Barnesville that lasted for about 40 miles. It got fairly heavy at times.
Dinner was at the Grove City Cracker Barrel with Sister-In-Law, because I see her about as often as I see Oldest Son. It’s always good to catch up with family.
It was -1° according to the car when I pulled in at the hotel at Richmond. Just after dinner, I picked up a Check Engine light on the car. At the hotel, I tried to use the windshield washer only to find it wasn’t working. It sounded almost like the pump had frozen up.

Second Leg
I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep Tuesday night, despite stopping my drive around 9:30. Part of it was trying to catch up with my online stuff because I obviously didn’t do any of that during the day. Part of it was simple decompression after driving 8 hours.
It was -7° when I woke up in Richmond. My primary concern at that point was whether the car would start. I suspect the battery that’s in there is the original battery because it’s been giving me grief for the last five or six weeks. I had to jump-start it a couple of times before the trip, and almost every time I ran it once I got to Pennsylvania. It didn’t give me any problems on the way up because I drove it 1700 miles and that charged the battery quite well. But the car started just fine despite the cold, and more importantly, I remembered my insulin!
Starting later in the morning than I’m used to and a hundred miles further along threw off my sense of timing. By 12:30, I was well clear of St Louis and my ETA home was about 6:00 p.m. Usually, my driving and my bladder get me home around seven or eight. The animals were happy to see me.
Reading
Editor Friend sent me home with a couple of books. I’ve mentioned before that I feel like I need to either switch to third person POV or add a bunch of third-person scenes in the living world. Editor Friend thought the books, Jeff Shaara’s To The Last Man and Steven James’ Broker of Lies, would help me get some ideas about how to handle the rewrites for Ghost. I haven’t read nearly enough lately either, so anything I can actually get my eyes on is a good thing. I’ve had several Shaara books on my TBR list for a while, so this should be good.
Writing
I haven’t made goal yet this year. I had what turned out to be unrealistic expectations about how much writing I’d be able to do. That’s not a bad thing. But I think I’ll be back to making goal next week, if not this week.
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