2 days to departure

Today I wrapped up some work, and also worked on decorations. I glued up a bunch more mah jongg tiles on the sides, added a few aquarium plants, repaired a few toys that had fallen off, and put some little fish that Georg had given me under the license plate.

Also I put Godzilla up in hostility corner. He's kind of sneaking up on the bird god. Or maybe he's on the bird god's side, fighting against the iguana. I'm a little concerned about Godzilla's stability. That leading edge of the roof gets the most wind pressure of anyplace on the car.

And I pulled off all the toys that had gotten sticky from melting in the sun, and replaced them with fresh new toys. Because I would hate for the kids at the Main Street Drag, especially the blind kids, to touch those melty toys and get sticky goo all over their hands. Alas, that means I had to get rid of the goldfish I had used as a sort of UMJ mascot on the T-shirt design and on the background image of this page. I love those goldfish but they just weren't made to bake in the sun every day. They turn clear and then get really gross.

And we started packing today. Georg wrote up a list, and I started putting the car art supplies (beads, glue etc) in the trunk and laying things out on the dining table. I think I've got all the equipment and paperwork (i.e. parade passes) accounted for. Didn't start packing clothes yet.

Rob got here this evening. Georg picked him up at the airport after work. The dogs remembered Rob and looked happy to see him. Well, Lina was all excited, but Thirteen looked happy from afar. I'm sure she'll be more comfortable with Rob by the time we get back.

We went to Pizza Palace for dinner, where we saw Lisa, Charlotte and Tom. The pizza was every bit as good as I remembered, but I have to say the service totally sucked. We waited for ever and ever, and then finally they brought Georg and Rob's pizza but my calzone didn't arrive until they were each starting on their third slices. And they were eating slowly since I didn't have my dinner yet. I ended up eating way too much because I was so hungry. It seemed like the staff were totally overwhelmed. Probably because of that newspaper article about them maybe being forced out of their lease. That's why we went -- I hadn't been there in years.

On the way to Pizza Palace we were stopped at a light, and someone in the car in front of us had a chicken puppet! He had the puppet out the window & it was waving at people in other cars. He saw us and got all excited, put the chicken puppet out the sunroof to wave at us. I tried to get a photo of the chicken puppet but the light changed too quickly.

A car problem came up tonight: one of the rear car windows suddenly won't close. It goes down, but not up. And the button at my seat doesn't do anything to it at all. The other windows are fine, and this one was normal two days ago. Lisa said a lot of new Beetles have this problem, there's a part called the "regulator" that controls the windows. We're going to take it to Merchant's first thing in the morning. I'm crossing my fingers that they can fix it! Driving to Texas with one window down would be No. Fun. At. All.

[Edited to add: The Merchant's website is the worst ever! There's no way to find out the hours of a specific store, or anything about the store except phone number and address. Yeesh!]

This time a week from now, I'll be in Houston! To be specific, exactly one week from now I'll probably be trying to fall asleep and failing miserably, as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve.