The upside to cabin fever...

...lots of writing.

My mom has a car, but it's a stick shift. I can't drive stick shift.

I know, it's a moral failing. I shall blame it on Captain Midnight and the silver Dodge Colt he owned while he was pitching woo. The nickname of this four-wheeled, five-speed abomination was The Flying Duck Flop, and I have no doubt it was distantly related to Stephen King's Christine. Any time you took your foot off the gas, the Duck Flop would swerve drastically to the right. I suspect the car was secretly in love with CM, thought of me as his Other Woman and was trying to do away with me in a traffic "accident," but I knew better than to tempt fate. After the first attempt to show the Duck Flop who was boss, I gave up and let CM drive. Eventually, after we got married, he did away with the Duck Flop and got a car with an automatic transmission. Such is True Love in action.

I suppose I could just take the heel-toe express and wander down to BYU campus for a while -- I hear the Carl Bloch exhibit is still going on, and I want to catch it before I head back to Washington -- but Mom really does need someone to fix meals and do dishes and take care of other household stuff, and I'm not going to leave her in the lurch. So I've been doing a fair amount of reading and a lot of writing. This is not too bad, on balance. For one thing, if Malcolm Gladwell is right, I've got most of those 10,000 hours to work through before I get really good.