Back to Real Life

by Stephanie Black

*Regarding the drawing for copies of Cold as Ice, there are a few bloggers I haven’t heard from yet. The list is here. If you won, haven't contacted me yet, and still want to review CAI, send me your snail mail address ASAP.*

In other news, the party is over. Vacation ended. It was fun while it lasted. Back to real life. After our family reunion, the kids and I spent a week hanging out at my parents’ house in southern Utah. My husband flew home to go back to work—for some reason I cannot fathom, he didn’t want to spend precious vacation days hanging out in an area where it’s a hundred zillion degrees in the summer. We don’t mind the heat—all we want to do is swim or sit around and talk in the air-conditioned indoors. It was great, and we even made it up to the Utah Shakespearean Festival a couple of times. And, of course, we ate Cafe Rio.

But soon it was time to say goodbye and pack up the minivan. The sad news is, I forgot to bring the chilled water bottles I’d put in the fridge the night before, so all we had were the warm ones that had been in the car all night. Woe is us! I’m sure the pioneers felt our pain, as we roared along the interstate in our padded, air-conditioned vehicle. Fact for the day so you feel like you learned something from my blog: there is a LOT of desert between California and Utah. I mean a LOT. If someone wants to buy seven hundred million trillion acres of uninhabited desert, I'm pretty sure I know where they could find it.

The trip home was actually shorter than I’d thought—for some reason I had it in my brain that it took twelve hours, like it does to drive to Provo, but it’s more like ten. And now that we don’t have any tiny kids (my youngest is five) travel isn’t such a big deal. I remember when we lived in Boston and would visit family in New York. It took six hours to drive there, but with babies/toddlers/preschoolers, boy howdy did that drive seem long. I’d take twelve hours in a car with a five-year-old over six hours in a car with a ten-month-old anytime. Though we did fear the five-year-old was going to be a bit of a fiend in human form. She was tired, cranky, and tyrannical after two weeks of partying. (Don’t tell her I said that. “I am not crabby!” she’ll shriek). But joy of joys, she took a nice nap. My oldest daughter was driving at the time (it was so nice to have help with the driving). “If Julia is still asleep at Bakersfield, you’ll have to keep driving forever and ever until she wakes up,” I warned her. “I will sacrifice my buns,” she said nobly, referring to the Numb Buns Syndrome that can afflict people on long car trips.

So now we are home again, and I have a delightful stack of books to read—I visited Seagull Book while we were in Utah. Currently reading: A Time to Die, by our own Jeffrey S. Savage. Other books I purchased: Blink of an Eye, by Gregg Luke, Alma the Younger, by Heather Moore, and The Silence of God by Gale Sears. My daughter wanted Agent Bishop, by Mike McPheters, so I bought that too.

And when I got home, not only did I get to see my wonderful husband again, but I had a bonus gift waiting—my author’s copies of Cold as Ice had arrived! Hooray! There’s nothing quite like seeing your book for the first time. My book! It’s here! I can hold it, and flip through the pages, and put in on my shelf, and gaze at it, and read it, and, and, woot! I’m excited. I’ve been listening to the audio book while I exercise, which is fun. Now if someone with LDS bookstores close by would like to take a picture of my book on the shelves and send it to me, that would be awesome . . .