Ok, let's get into details here. You know you want to know.
After Tuesday's pain, Wednesday was relatively peaceful, and we made the last minute preparations for our yearly trip to DragonCon. We have done the art show there for the last 3 years and had already paid and arranged for this year. It's hard to walk away from money you've paid and promises you've made -- at least it is for us -- so we were going.
Hurricane and miscarriages notwithstanding. I mean, damn, this is DRAGONCON. Biggest SF/Fantasy/Horror/Comics convention in the southeast, and possibly the whole country. It gets bigger each year. So we piled into the van and we drove.
Usually the trip is a leisurely 7-8 hours, depending on food and potty stops. However, while we were trying to leave Florida, so was everyone else. I-75 had long stretches of traffic all piled up for...nothing. Nothing there. No accident, no highway patrol, no naked man on the side of the road, nothing. There were some places where they were working on the road, but it wasn't actually blocking the roadway. Then you'd pass some magical point that looked just like every other point you'd passed and all the traffic would go away. It made no sense.
Now, this wouldn't have been so very bad except for one little factor. I was passing bloodclots about every hour as Miscarriage Pt II began. Oh yes. If you go back to when I started this weblog, you'll read my detailed tribute to August 2003: The Month of Blood. Well, here I am, a year later, and damn it if I'm not doing the same thing. Only this year's new twist was Bleeding In The Car.
There was no way to stop often enough. There wasn't any method to prevent it. I sat in my own blood for some very long hours -- yes, it soaked through the (black) shorts I wore, and I put papertowels under me to protect the seat. I had cramps, and then the entirely too disgusting to describe sensation of passing a clot, and then the sticky-cold-wet-yucky sensation of knowing it was just too damn late to bother with finding a bathroom. A couple of the bathrooms I did seek in my desperation were, indeed, requiring desperation to brave. One little convenience store wonder had a double stall with a single door at the end so that you could pee in tandem. You had to be friends -- no way around it. I didn't look in the toilet because it would have been bad. I was just grateful to escape.
In any case, once the objective of the hotel was achieved, the bleeding slowed down considerably and everything went along quite well. The show was good, there were no particular problems, and we made about as much money there as we ever have (hip hurray!) I didn't get to see Peter Woodward this year because I didn't often escape the booth, but Wayne Pygram (Scorpius of Farscape) did stop by to get a massage and gave us a couple of signed photos and a CD he's done. I made the mistake of thinking him British instead of Australian, but that's because I did my best to keep the show going by never watching a single episode. He's got a bit of that Patrick Stewart thing going for him. I was all about it. Also saw Marc Singer of Beastmaster fame as he did a quick run-through of the art show. That about did it for Famous People I Have Spoken To for this year.
So, then it was Monday and Frances the Hurricane had become Frances the Tropical Storm, dropping rain and blowing wind all along I-75. We decided that wisdom indicated driving through this in the dark to get home at 4 am and then go to work at 8 was STUPID. We stayed the night and left the next morning, in much less dramatic weather. For the same reason, we did not use 75 into Florida, but took the old and lesser used backroads to 441. That was, once upon a time in the 50's, THE tourist road into Florida, but now it's mostly little towns, trailer parks, and old farms. We saw lots of flooding and downed trees. Trees cracked in half by wind, trees split and burned by lightening (saw three of those), trees uprooted from the rainsoftened ground and pushed over. It was impressive and a little scary.
And now I'm home and...the bleeding has started again. I woke up this morning in bloodsoaked bedsheets, an act that inspired one of the cats (she knows who she is) to clamber up and pee there. Oh joy, oh rapture, I'm home.
