After all the preparation and expense, the trip to Bellevue fell through. My sweet little mother-in-law got terribly sick the day we were leaving, so I stayed home and played nurse for about a week (there was a LOT of laundry, etc.) She's much better now, and we have upgraded the handicap features in her house to avoid future problems. We still need a ramp.

So, I'm preparing for "Take Back the Night" in Dillon, MT, in a couple weeks, along with winterizing our house in White Sulphur Springs. It's a bit scary leaving Betty for a week, but we do have a good support system in her neighborhood. I have two more trips this year, but Jim will stay home with his mother during those.

I opened the file on "Chasing Ghosts" yesterday and worked on it awhile. It is such fun! Right now I'm researching travel conditions for 1880 railroad passengers, and reading "The Long Winter" by Laura Ingalls Wilder again. My great grandmother rode the train from Peru, Illinois to Kearny, Nebraska (pregnant and aged sixteen), and spent that awful winter in Kearny with her husband and new baby. It's absolutely fascinating to read the history and imagine what it was like for her. Kearny was still the wild west. There were forty foot drifts, back to back blizzards for seven months, and the trains stopped running before January first. People were starving, freezing and fighting each other. Then when spring broke, the huge amount of snow melted and washed out the tracks, so it was June 15 before the trains started bringing food again. In May the Missouri was five miles wide at St Louis. Laura Ingalls was fourteen and living 500 miles north of Kearny in the same conditions.

Back to the gym.

Forgot to mention: I'm still working on my contribution to a paper being published at some point by the University of Illinois, a primer of first person accounts on domestic violence. It's been an interesting exercise. Can't yet guage its importance.

One down, three more to go, and then I get to go back to "Chasing Ghosts" and my notorious ancesters. We made a quick trip to Missoula for the Festival of the Book, driving all the way back yesterday (thank heaven for an engrossing audiobook--makes the time fly by.) On Weds (Sept. 19th) I'll go to Bellevue (WA) for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Assn. trade show. I'm a vendor this year (legacy of self-publishing.) Then (driving) to Dillon, MT, for Domestic Violence Awareness event on October 11th. The last one for the year is the High Plains Bookfest in Billings on October 25th to 27th (flying.) Sometime during this period I get to visit grandkids.

Book sales are brisk.