I am so excited!

I don't believe it! This is great, I actually got a comment on my blog! Suegee of Suegee's Meanderings posted under my last entry, because I had posted a comment on her blog! It is funny that we both have "Meanderings" but it is a total coincidence, I swear. My husband and I, what seems like millions of years ago now, once had an inspiration to write a travel newsletter back when people actually sold hard copy travel newsletters. We were going to do this to make money and be able to retire from our boring day jobs. Now everything is free on the internet so it's unlikely anyone would now be willing to pay for our old fashioned newsletter that we still haven't done, but that's where the idea started because we were going to call the newsletter "Marvelous Meanderings." I even wrote one issue of it, on San Francisco. We never actually finished it but the material was helpful to give to friends who were heading to The City By The Bay until the contents became obsolete. So when I decided to do a blog, I figured "Mauigirl's Meanderings" was nicely alliterative and similar to our old idea for the newsletter.

Speaking of San Francisco, we just booked a trip there for the 5 nights after Thanksgiving. I think I'm going to be stuck doing Thankgiving this year but I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. I'm going to go ahead and give in to the temptation and just order the whole darn thing at King's Supermarket. You can get the whole turkey and all the fixings, the squash, the mashed potatoes, everything - just order it ahead of time and go pick it up on the big day. Sounds like a plan to me! Then I will make my relatives take home all the leftovers and my Dear Husband and I will just head for the coast the next day.

We're going to stay at the York Hotel (which was featured in "Vertigo" lo these many years ago, although at the time it was called the "Empire."). It's a nice, relatively inexpensive hotel (we're getting our room for $79 a night), right on Sutter Street. One of its key benefits always was that it was about two doors up from our favorite bar, the Overflo. Sadly, last year when we were in San Francisco we discovered the owners had finally sold the old place (the old man had died a few years ago and I guess the sons didn't want to keep running it). It's still a bar but it has a new name and less charm. The old Overflo was a local bar, a neighborhood hangout. We'd go in there and end up having the most fascinating conversations (being in San Francisco, even the drunks are intelligent). And we'd never get out of there without someone buying us at least one round of beers. One time we played pool with the son of a doorman at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. The son was also a doorman at a somewhat lesser establishment, the Mark Twain. And one time the owner, Dale, gave us hats and mugs to take with us back to New Jersey, with the Overflo name emblazoned on them. Sometimes we'd have been out to dinner already and drunk a bottle of wine before we'd arrive at the Overflo, and by the time we bought one round of beers and two other people bought us rounds of beers, we ended up barely able to stagger back up the hill to the York.

Our dog will have to stay at the vet for the 5 nights we're gone; she already stayed there when we were away in the summer, and, Diva that she is, she was the belle of the ball there. Everyone loved her at the vet's and she got lots of extra attention. She didn't seem to be all that anxious to come home with us, in fact!

My DH has headed off on a business trip for 2-1/2 weeks - to Australia no less - and I am now officially on my own with Diva and our cat Baxter. I have recently been cleaning out my old family homestead, as my mother has moved into a senior citizen apartment down the street from me. It takes forever to clean out a house that has been lived in by the same family for 40 years. We've already gotten out everything we want and the place looks as if it is still occupied but has been ransacked. One of the perks of doing this is digging out all my old letters and memorabilia from my closet in my old bedroom. I now have brought home three large boxfuls of letters from when I was age 14 on. I spent this evening reading over old letters from my oldest friend that I've known since we were in grade school together. I haven't heard from her in a few years (she lives in New York state where I used to live until I was 14) so I decided to write her a letter out of the blue. I hope she'll write back; we go through these phases of being out of touch for awhile and then out of the blue one of us will write and touch base. I haven't seen her in 25 years. But some friends are friends for life.