Santa Barbara

Tonight I am in the Best Western Pepper Tree Inn. This motel has been here as long as I've been traveling up the coast. Nice room, but small. An orange and an apple and two bottles of water awaited me. I had some of my sourdough multigrain bread from Trader Joe's and the last of my gourmet olives for dinner. I'll probably wander out for a real meal about 7:30 or so.

The drive up was lovely; warm and sunny. I listened to dance hits of the 70's and 80's on 93.9 FM in LA until they faded out, then put classical on. I managed to get lost trying to figure out how to get to Highway 1 and ended up on the 605 south to the 405 northwest to the 10 west, which becomes 1 north. If I'd taken I5 north to the 10, it would have cut about two hours off my travel time. The 405 was a parking lot and so was Highway 1 in places, both because of road construction. (Highway 1 has evidently suffered a few landslides around Malibu.) Because of all the rain this winter, the hillsides are greener than I've ever seen them, and there are big billowing clouds of wild mustard and daisies, all bright yellow. Anyway, I made it to Santa Barbara and got a room where I wanted to.

The rest of this will be kind of random.

John and I drove out and saw Mom yesterday. We met up with her and my aunt Emma at Chili's. Mom looked awful. Emma told me she had paid for Mom to get a permanent when the hairdressers came to the facility, and no one had come to get her, so she never got the perm. Her hair looks dull and disheveled, and she smelled kind of vinegary to me. She couldn't read the menu; all the colors and jaggy print seemed to confuse her and she turned it upside down once, trying to figure it out. Eventually John helped her to order a turkey sandwich. She only ate half of it and got the rest to go, but I'm sure it will sit in her fridge until it turns green. She has taken to picking up rocks, claiming she will put them around her potted plants, but the truth is that she never removes them from her purse. We ended up getting her to pull everything out of her purse and I "liberated" a double handful of rocks and stuck them in my own bag (and later left them on Emma's coffee table as a joke). Trying to get her back to the car to take her home was an effort as she had to stop and examine every little piece of quartz and granite in the planters. Her room is a mess, clothes and papers everywhere. Her latest thing is to ask where her drop-leaf tea cart is and then accuse Emma of stealing it. The truth is that the tea cart dried out and fell to pieces at least 25 years ago. The last time I saw it, it was a box of parts, and she said "Do you want this?" and I nearly laughed. I said "no" so I'm assuming it went to Salvation Army. For some reason she wants it now and when we tell her she gave it away, she frowns terribly for a while, and then you can almost hear the reset button click, her vision clears, and she says, "Where's my drop-leaf tea cart? Did Emma ever return it?" Along with the rocks in her purse, she had a million pieces of kleenex and paper napkin shreds she's been using as kleenex. John wrote down her next perm appointment on a napkin and I told him she would just use it to blow her nose. Sure enough, by the time we got her home, she had put it to just that use. We both can see that she's just about ready for the next level of care. She says they allow her to walk around as long as she stays in sight of the building, but I guess they've had to chase her down a couple times when she's forgotten that. She didn't remember the facility where she lives now, and once inside her room she couldn't remember what the courtyard outside looked like. When Emma brought her in to Whittier for an appointment on Tuesday, she never mentioned the house. She seems to have forgotten she ever lived there. I wonder what it's like to only have a "now" for reference?

Chili's was a bust. Not even up to Acapulco standards, and we thought that Acapulco was a downmarket El Torito. Sad when you discover an old favorite is going downhill. On the other hand, one night when John and I went to dinner even later than usual, we found that Bob's Big Boy in our neighborhood was open until 10:30. I didn't even know the chain had been resurrected. I had my childhood standard -- a combo burger and a chocolate malt -- and John and I invoked Dad by saying "Drink or dessert!" He never let us order both, ostensibly because we didn't finish our dinners. I've never known that to be a problem with our family, so I think he was just cheap. The shakes and malts are still served in a silver fountain "glass" with the leftovers in the mixing cup alongside. The silver glass is much smaller than I remember but I got two full refills out of the mixing cup so I guess not much has changed there! And it's nice to have a place that still knows what a malt is!

My friend Lloyd gave me a respite from sorting for a couple days. However, the Rav 4 I got upgraded to decided to break. Lloyd rolled down a window and that window refused to roll back up again. The one on the other side worked fine so we knew it was the window that was busted and not something we'd done. I drove Lloyd to the Whittier Hertz office, but they didn't have any cars so they directed us to the one in Downey. Heat and traffic later, we showed up to be given a Nissan X-Terra that was nasty but was the only thing they had. They hadn't even bothered to clean it: there were Dorito crumbs and the lingering smell of cigarettes when we got in. Later, when I went to fill the tank, we couldn't find the gas cap release, and while I was searching under the driver's seat I discovered the previous occupant's CD stash. We had already found his rental agreement in the center console. Hertz is going to get a piece of my mind.

Anyway, we did nothing but run errands that first day, but the second day I took her to La Brea Tar Pits as a consolation prize for missing out on Disneyland. http://www.tarpits.org/ I just couldn't take spending all that money to go to Disneyland when I knew I wouldn't be able to stay the whole day. We had a pretty good time. They have different stuff every time I go there, and this time I realized that there are little asphalt seeps all over the front lawn of the place, and even one in the parking lot! I wonder how the Page Museum manages to stay in place?

We had dinner with a couple of friends of hers at Il Fornaio, which is a GREAT Italian place. We were seated by a nice man who said he wasn't our server, but who brought us water... and then bread ... and then took our order ... so we never did see our "real" server but he was just fine!

I'm not done, I'm just burning out and will now go out and see if I can find a sandwich and a book. See you later.