Two More Sleeps

"Adventures? Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner!”
~ Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

The first leg of our journey to Los Angeles to embark on the Viking Sky is over. Our friends, Mike & Joy, who joined us for an Alaska cruise in 2017, very kindly drove us to Springfield, MO today. We enjoyed a lovely lunch together at FB's Grill and had a great time catching up with them. They are a wonderful couple. We sing in the same choir and attend the same Sunday School class, but it's amazing how you can see someone pretty often and still not know what's going on with their lives. We picked right up with where we left off last time we did something fun together, which I suppose is a good measure of friendship. I feel like I need to do better, to be more accessible, to be intentional in all my friendships. Call that a resolution if you like. 

 We're in our flight departure city so we can catch a plane at oh-dark:thirty in the morning. Tomorrow we'll fly from here to Dallas and then on to LA to meet our friends Kristy & Dave who've been with us for both our previous world cruises. They won't be on the Sky this time, but we will be able to spend tomorrow evening and Sunday morning with them since they'll drive up and join us at the Crown Plaza. I'm thrilled about seeing them again and being in our embarkation city a day ahead of time eases my nightmare fantasies of watching our ship sail out of the harbor without us because we thought we could make it from the midwest to the coast on the day of. 

Speaking of fantasies...last night I had a vivid dream. I have them sometimes. Once I dreamed about a filthy little white dog with a long ropey coat who needed us. I told both my husband and my dad about it, and told them I didn't know when, but a dog fitting that description was coming. Sure enough, two months later we found Charlie running around in traffic and now he has a forever home with us. But back to last night...

I dreamed I got a call from one of my old publishers asking me to consider writing another book. To be fair, I have received emails from them to that effect from time to time, but this was different. They didn't want a romance from me. One of their other writers had begun a 2 book series, but had died before they could write the second one. They wanted me to pick up that story and finish it. 

To try to convince me, they took me to a book launch party for the series. The book was beautiful. Hardcover with amazing artwork and gilt-edged pages. When I opened the book, it was more compelling that an illuminated manuscript, though I couldn't read a single word, it being in a dream after all. I felt as if I was being pulled into the pages. 

This was not genre fiction. This was literary. It was an important story. 

Half the roomful of people were raving about it. The other half thought it was terrible. 

"Why?" I asked the naysayers.

"It's unsafe. Anything can happen," was the answer.

I woke thinking "Just like life."

Life is unsafe. But fortunately, as Mark Twain observed, life is "filled with calamities, most of which never happened." We can plan. We can prepare. But eventually, we have to realize we aren't really in control of much of anything. 

We'll continue to emulate Goofy, who said, "I'm brave, but I'm careful." And we welcome the coming adventure with open arms to whatever is heading our way. I can't promise to write a big beautiful unsafe novel, but I do promise to bring you an "unsafe" blog. 

Anything can happen. Here's to being late for dinner!

My poor DH. Here's me, packing light. Did I mention we've already shipped two 50 lb bags ahead?