Home Again, but Not for Long

We're home again for a little while. Comicon was exhausting, as always, but we had a fine time. The reaction to the Human Target pilot was enthusiastic and I've been catching press notices about it thanks to Google Alerts. I'm hoping it will be a huge success so I can buy the house I want and hold grand parties in it while Ace grazes in the back yard in a happy retirement.

We got together with James Moran, a British writer who has worked on Dr. Who, Torchwood, and Crusoe, and his wife Jodie Kearns, an opera singer, for dinner last night. We never saw them at Comicon, and they came back to L.A. for a few days before heading back to London. Because of Twitter and Facebook, we knew they were around but it's purely by chance that you run into friends in a crowd of 150,000. Even when you plan a meeting, it's hard to find people. James and Jodie are staying in Santa Monica, so we took them out to El Cholo, an L.A. restaurant that dates back to the 1920s, which has a location close to their hotel. We introduced them to margaritas, table-side-made guacamole, and green corn tamales, which is just about my favorite combination of traditional L.A. cuisine. They were duly impressed, so I suggested they might try The Border Grill before they leave town. That restaurant is walking-distance from their hotel. It was a relaxing dinner with excellent conversation, something that can be lacking in the Comicon environment.

While it was doubtful it would happen until yesterday, I'm taking a quick trip back East to head to the western foothills of the Catskill Mountains for my high school reunion. I'd rather not say how many years, but I have great fondness for that particular year and its place in history.

As I've mentioned before, I haven't gotten on a plane since September 7, 2001, when we flew back from New York. I haven't seen the edited skyline of the city in person. I'm arriving on a red-eye, so that should be interesting.

I'm planning on taking "Talkie Tina," our Magellan GPS unit along with me. She and I don't get along very well, but it will be easier than following a map without a navigator. I'm pretty sure that my automatic pilot will turn on once I get off Long Island (where I attended college) and out of the greater New York City environs. I would be hard pressed to count the number of times I've made the trip by car between New York and Delaware County, but it has been a long stretch since the last time. I doubt there will be enough hours to do all of the things I'd like to cram in the 5 days I'll be there, but I'm going to do as many as I can. I've got my fingers crossed for some good estate sales on Saturday morning, and the county fair should at least be set up before I head back down state on Sunday (it will be open if I wait until Monday, but I'm not sure about doing that.) I hope that my small home town has an Internet cafe or wifi at the library, because I guarantee my mother isn't going to have any kind of a hook-up at home. OMG. What will I do?