Friday was my last day of full-time work, at least at The Mailbox. Our boss, Sharon, put together a nice Zoom presentation featuring photos of her ten favorite Mark Moments, which I think we all enjoyed. It certainly hit some of the high points from the day job over all these many years. The idea of retirement hasn't really sunk in yet, since tomorrow would have been just another day back at work, and now it won't.
Friday evening, Brugger and I rode up to Martinsville and met friends Samaire
and Stephen at
La Plazita, a relatively new Mexican restaurant in Uptown Martinsville. The food was
pretty good, the service a little less brag-worthy. Stephen said it's been
much better on their previous visits, so I'm sure I'll give the place another try
before long. Afterward, we retired to Pleasant Hill, where we put our
heads together to come up with some ideas for the upcoming release of my
collection, Fugue Devil: Resurgence, which
Samaire's company,
Black Raven Books, is set to release in the spring. We didn't knock off till sometime in the
wee hours, but it was both productive and enjoyable.
Yesterday, Ms. B. and I headed down to
Autumn Creek Vineyards, where we met friends Terry & Beth for wine and picnicking. The new
owners of Autumn Creek — David & Laura — made us feel very welcome, which
we appreciated. The wine is decent; North Carolina wine, to be sure, but
decent.
This morning, the usual Sunday geocaching gathering of the
No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a.
Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie),
Old Rob (a.k.a. Old Rob), and Old Rodan (a.k.a. me)
— appeared questionable, given an ominous weather forecast and Natalie not
feeling tip-top. However, it wasn't raining at our regular meeting time, and
Natalie said she felt better, so off we went, this time to several
destinations in and around Winston-Salem. We sought several along the
Salem Creek Greenway, all of which were fun, particularly since no rain was falling at the time.
Just above, you see me at a cache called "You Shall Not Cross!" (GC9N9HQ). I did kind of want to cross, but since the remains of the old bridge are
blocked off, I just opted to stand there for a while.
After that, we snagged a couple of other random caches and then headed to the
Muddy Creek Greenway, a few miles west of town. By now, splatters of rain had begun, and once on
the trail, it began coming down in earnest. Did this dissuade us? No, because
we are tenacious (though I've heard some folks of our acquaintance use any
number of other descriptors). We had a fairly long hike ahead of us — about
three miles round trip — but we managed to make it somewhat longer and
far more difficult. After finding two of our three target caches,
we failed to look closely enough at the map to determine that bushwhacking to
the next cache without backtracking to the greenway was actually a bad...
BAD... idea. The river, we learned, is of considerable breadth and quite in
the way. Apart from the plummeting temperature and increasing downpour, we now
had dense, tangled woods and lots of deep muckity-muck to complicated our
journey. This ended up adding a couple of extra miles of hiking before we
could get back on the greenway and backtrack. I'm sure the extra workout in
the cold and rain did us a spot of good, don't you think?
It wasn't necessarily fun, but at the end of the day, most gratifying.
This coming week, I plan to put in significant work on my current
Ameri-Scares
novel and, hopefully, start plotting a new novel for grown-ups. It feels like
high time.
Onward.
|
| Big honking railroad bridge over the Salem Creek Greenway |
|
|
I've not been this wet since the last time we hiked 5.4 miles in a
downpour. Some call us tenacious. Some call us other things. |
