Home for the Holidays

Yes, we're home from Utah.

Sigh.


Don't get me wrong. I was thrilled to see my son and looking forward to the holidays.

But it was perfect in Utah. No snow yet (a disappointment) but otherwise gorgeous! Temps in the 40s (I'm such a jeans and sweatshirt girl) and QUIET. The construction in the development is finished (at least until the economy turns) and the "resort" element is waiting for ski season so it was just a beautiful, sleepy valley to putter around in.

We stopped at the market on our way to the condo and stocked up on too much junk food (and about a gallon of Cream O' Weber chocolate milk, which would spoil you for all other chocolate milk) then settled in to enjoy the quiet. DH, at my request, put his phones on vibrate (and on a pillow) so that they didn't interrupt the quiet. Not surprisingly (since we'd been up since 3:00 am) we both had a lovely nap in our chairs which got our visit off to the perfect start.

One of my favorite fall sights in the valley are these trees with the orange bark. In some areas the valley just glows orange.

Most of the time we just kept the TV on mute (DH can follow football quite nicely without the inane comments from the sportscasters, thank you). Stitching did occur. And I listened to The Amber Spyglass on audio while I stitched. Little flaw in one of the discs so I missed chapters 27 through 30. I'm hoping what appears to be something smeared on the disc will clean off. If not, I can read the chapters in my hard book. I was also trying to stay awake on the last night to finish the book and kept dozing off during the last couple of chapters so have to "re-read" those in some form or another.

I had finished New Moon (the second in the Twilight series) on the plane up and kept Eclipse next to the bed for nighttime reading. I was proud of my control! I managed to not bring the book up for daytime reading, and finished it on the plane home.

As I said above, there was stitching. And frogging. And re-stitching. And re-frogging. Stich. Frog. Stich. Frog.

I gave up.

My goal on this piece is to finish all the floss, then the metallics. Then I'll block it. I bought a BIG set of Q-snaps - big enough for the entire design. After I block it I'll mount it in the big snaps and do the beading. Then I'll take it to Utah so the Shepherd's Bush framer can frame it for me. Trouble is, somewhere during the couple of years that I've worked on the blue fairy (keep in mind, I only work on this piece in Utah because I'm finding it very difficult to work on the small gauge, dark blue linen and can't do it with the distractions here at home) I dropped a couple of vertical rows. It didn't make much of a difference in the body of the dress, but now that I'm at the border along the bottom of the skirt things aren't working out right. I decided that what I need to do is work the metallics along that border now, then go fill in the rest of that dress. I'll have to make stitch-by-stitch decisions on how much rust, how much blue to work in, but it will be OK. The problem I was having this week is that I don't have a definite line to orient the stitching (since I'm off the chart). Of course, since we were flying and only wanted to bring carry-on luggage, I opted to leave all the non-essentials (like the metallics) at home. Once I made the decision to abandon the blue skirt for now, I moved the piece up and worked on the green fairy's petticoat. Much easier, although the white is pretty boring to work on.

The visit was pretty idyllic. The only negative was that we scratched the rental car.

We'd set off on Sunday afternoon hoping for a late lunch/early dinner out. Our favorite restaurant is closed on Sundays (we don't think they are LDS, but so many families spend their Sundays at family dinner that a lot of the restaurants close), so we went to the next choice. They were closed for a month's vacation (also something that happens during the off season up there). So we ended up just going to the Wingers for a hamburger.

DH decided to take the back route home (up over the North Ogden divide which would have taken us up closer to the snow-capped peaks and always gives us a breath-taking view of the valley. We were turned around on the road up by a very kind policeman ("Sorry, I'll have to turn you around." ) Just minutes before we got there, there had been a horrible car accident. A woman had a suspected "diabetic incident" and drifted to her left, rear-ending a car waiting to make a left turn. The car she hit smashed into the Saturn in front of it (also waiting to turn left), pushing the entire back end of the plastic car into the pilot and co-pilot's seat. When we left for home, the newspaper reported that the 13-year-old girl who had been in the back seat of the Saturn was still in extremely critical condition.

Now turned back to our usual route, we continued up 12th Street. Before we had gone even a mile we saw more flashing lights. There had been another serious accident at the intersection of 12th and Monroe. Not too many emergency vehicles (they were all up at the near-fatality we had just been turned away from) but three vehicles involved. One was a pick-up with oversized tires. It was nose-in at about a 45-degree angle in the roadside ditch but leaning toward its right side. Both tires were off the left side of the car. The missing tires were lying in the road. We haven't figured that one out.

We continued up through the Ogden Canyon and started the left turn over the spillway (which is how you get to Eden unless you want to take a 20-minute detour around the reservoir.)

Our usual "Welcome Home" picture.

As you make the left onto the dam, there is a tall wall (we don't know why they built this view-destroying wall there but it's about 8 feet tall) so you can't really see what's waiting on the spillway when you are driving up to it. As DH made the turn and we were just nosing onto the spillway, we looked across the water and saw one of those huge fire department ambulances coming our way and almost to the narrow, two-lane road across the spillway.

Even in our aged, befuddled, vacation-state brains it only took a second to realize that the oversized ambulance and our rented Camry were not both going to fit on that spillway, so DH pulled into the tiny bit of shoulder (about a foot wide and only about three feet long) that was at the entrance to the spillway road. This left the car behind us stuck across the road in front of the rapidly-approaching ambulance. DH inched our car up as far as he could so the other car could pull in out of the way and got 1/64th of an inch too close to the guardrail. Fortunately, the scrape (in the bright red paint) was only on the front fender. It could easily have been all the way along the side of the car. And one of the things we love about Utah is that everyone is pretty hang loose about this kind of stuff. In fact, one of the women who helped us at the Enterprise rental return had been raised in Eden (still lives there) and knew the spillway well.

It will cost us $$$, but to me the worst part of any "accident" is the wondering (and often the guilt) if you could have done anything to prevent it. In this case I truly don't think there was anything DH could have done. It was either a small scrape from the guardrail, or a large scrape from the ambulance.

Oh yes, and the ambulance was not going to either of the accidents we had already seen. He hung a left turn and went back toward Huntsville. As we watched him drive up the road we saw a third accident. In this one a white truck (or maybe a van?) was off the road and headed nose-down toward the reservoir.

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, so I figure that people had been watching football games and drinking and then headed home. It was weird - almost apocalyptic - to see so many accidents in such a short period and such a short distance from each other. All things considered, we were pretty lucky to have only had that small scrape and no physical injuries.

We sure were happy to get safely tucked in, however.