28 Days

It is 24 days until I will stop being "Zapaper", as it were, and become "Mrs. Pocket of Bolts." I am winding up my fourth and last wedding planning trip to the city where the event is going to take place--I fly out early tomorrow so I decided on a hotel near the airport. It's strange being alone after spending so much time with family. When my dad dropped me off here and started on the two hour drive back to where he lives, I felt momentarily at a loss, almost the way I did when my family dropped me off in Boston where I went to college and suddenly after a boisterous three week road-trip with our elbows in constantly in each other's faces... I was alone facing my freshman year, the first time living outside the nest. Of course there's really nothing so momentous about this particular separation. I'll be back in less than a month, only a few weeks! But somehow I feel like I will be different when next I'm here.

I'd just met with the photographer, the last of the nine appointments I had during my few days here, and the last vendor who needed to be contracted with. I was pretty wound up from the nervousness of having to make important decisions and from having had so much coffee.

I called Pocket of Bolts first. He's on a wholly different plane from me this weekend, having a sort of early bachelor on the opposite coast. We are in different modes and moods and time zones but very much in agreement that we miss each other and want very much to be back together again.

The hotel has a swimming pool and a hot tub, but I didn't bring a swimming suit. I did, however, have a navy blue tank top with shelf-bra and some black underwear. Close enough! I had a nice long soak in the spa, and then a shower. Then I took some of my scholarly reading down to the restaurant, and quietly read and ate a decent "Mandarin Chicken Salad." Who knows why I also had to go for the apple pie as well, but somehow I was helpless before the power of temptation. After I ate that, I was deeply deeply full, so I went for a long walk.

I reserved this hotel on Orbitz this morning, the only real criteria being "free airport shuttle" and "free wireless", though for some reason "clean" and "not run down" turn out to feel important too. This one's actually kind of a winner in that regard. It's right next to a golf course, which might displease some but I didn't have a problem with it. I took a really long walk, just along the road, to help burn off the extra calories. The road seemed to go through the golf course (rather, to cut it in half). As a result, there were a lot of rabbits, who clearly are happy to inhabit those big grassy spaces. The rabbits were cute and not very shy.

The light was beautiful, one of those gorgeous falls of light where there are dark intense grey clouds overhead but the sun has fallen so low that the slanting light shines sideways and lights up the trees and the grass, making the grey clouds almost seem to glow and touching everything else with gold. Things smelled nice. Gradually I separated out the smells and identified some of the nicest ones as flowers. So I picked a wildflower bouquet as I went along, clovers and wildrose and some great-smelling white tree flower and flowering grass heads (I'm not allergic) and some nightshade sort of thing and queen anne's lace. The thing is actually pretty nice looking, arranged in a plastic cup on my desk... I took a few cell phone pictures and thought about myself as a bride.

After that, I meant to do some work but instead I got started watching unfamiliar TV channels. Typically I don't watch much TV, but on a whim I did. I watched about 15 minutes of Titanic (running around in the flooding ship action scenes, actually quite a low point in the film) and maybe half an hour of 300, which I had actually never seen before (lots of Persians getting skewered--but wait, that's probably the whole movie, isn't it). It struck me as very Lord of the Rings inspired, what with all the Asian monstrosities.

Meanwhile a tremendous lightning storm brewed up and started rumbling and flashing. After a while the satellite kicked out and there was no more TV. That was pretty salutary because it inspired me to get on my workout clothes and go down to the fitness room. This place gets good marks for its fitness room--there's bottled water and the machines actually work. The elliptical (my machine of choice) was about a foot a way from a mirror, so I noticed the way my body looked. I was surprised how satisfactory it looked.

Now I am back from a hard half-hour workout and drooping with tiredness. I'm going to leave my entire room a disaster area until tomorrow morning. Why not?