So, jumping right in, last night, I was driving home with Duke after a weekend down state. First of all - it was great and so relaxing. We spent time at the lake, I drank wine on a boat which ranks right up in the top five of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon, and Duke Benny marched around with a bubble gun, pulling the happiest trigger in the history of triggers. Anyway, we wound up ending our mini vacation at the Gilmore Car Museum which is literally in the middle of nowhere, like God found  a corn field and decided to drop a few buildings and some old vintage cars right there - plop, plop! There was this vintage motorcycle show, so you know why I was there.

The carnival food.
And because Ryan.

It started to rain though, so I ate my corndog while speed walking / speed pushing the stroller to the car. Someone chased me with a shoe that Duke dropped, which explains why he was shouting "uh oh!" and this mom of the year just kept handing him bites of corndog because that's what I thought "uh oh" meant.

Anyway, it was a three hour drive home and I really had it in my head to just enjoy the drive, so I skipped the highway and cruised a lot of back roads in the rain and I'll tell you now that gloomy and gray might be my new favorite way to travel. The whole way, I listened to a few old Fresh Air interviews with Anthony Bourdain, and man, what a loss.

I'm selfishly so sorry that the world lost his creativity. Like everyone else I guess, I've been casually rewatching old episodes of Parts Unknown, leaving it on while I do the dishes, or fold laundry in the dining room, dipping in here and there to wish I could cook like that, eat like that, engage like that, tell stories like that. Or know someone who did.

And that's the thing. His voice has filled my living room so many times, it feels familiar.

Celebrity deaths are so weird, you know. Like they're such a commodity and so disconnected from normal people that it almost doesn't feel real when they die. Not that they don't matter. They do and they're real people to someone, but they almost never like to me like real people. But Anthony Bourdain never felt like a character. He was real and I feel a sense of something lost.

***

New week, you know. Everything goes on because we all have work to go to and trash to take out and a million other whatnots. Speaking of whatnots, I've decided to go all in on one of our unused / storage place for everything we try to forget we own but don't want to get rid of bedrooms this week and make it priority. Well, priority-ish. Basically, I'm pinteresting really fun searches like "charcoal gray paint" and "how to build a pallet shelf."

You'll find me hyperventilating in the the paint aisle at Lowes if you're looking for me.

Cheers!