Sweet Home Los Angeles

No cell phone reception? You don't say...

Remember how I said I might vanish off the Internet last week if I couldn't get my mobile hotspot to work in Ohio? Um, I guess I was presuming that I would actually get a cell phone signal at my grandpa's house. Tmobile.com, thanks for the misinformation.

I spent much of my visit awash in nostalgia, partly because I used to spend half of my summers at my grandparents' houses, and partly because this has been the family home for generations, and I was imagining all the stories and family dramas that played out there. Remember that story I told about Ed and Zouri and the diamond ring? This is the house that Ed and Zouri built. My grandpa lives there now, but next door is the little house that he built and raised his family in, where my mom grew up, where she lived in high school when she started dating my dad, where they lived as a young married couple with two children.

I took a few photos to share:

The original Gerstacker homestead

Thank heavens for city water lines

The distance between where my mom grew up and her grandparents' home,
and where I spent my first year

It's great to be home, even though my husband was sick while I was gone and my apartment was starting to look like a man-cave when I got back. Honey, why is there trash on the counter? Um, because the garbage was full... How convenient that the cleaning fairy always comes home whenever I do!

As for the reading/writing, I did get some reading done, but chores and socializing kept me from any creative output. Since I got back from Big Sur, I haven't really written much of anything. I'm still examining my plot from a new perspective, and considering the changes that I could make the strengthen it. I'm pretty sure I bring in my antagonist waaaay too late in the story, and I need to fix that and trim out more fat to tighten things up. Why is it so hard to see these things in your own writing?