backend visit

Sako is driving to Seattle from Las Vegas right now. She's on the last leg of her trip, which started on Saturday. She has to be back home by Tuesday, at least in time to get to the first day of her class; she claims that she needs it as a prerequisite for nursing school, although I'm skeptical when she says it's the last, or rather, one of the last.

There have been a number of classes that she says has been the absolute last one that she needs before applying to schools. One of the difficulties of nursing schools, as I understand it, is that many of them have completely different prerequisites, barring a common baseline. If she targeted one school and geared her prereq classes to that school only, this ongoing saga of piecemeal coursework would have a finite end; unfortunately, another of the difficulties of nursing schools, I'm told, is that there is a great deal of competition to get in. Sako is hedging her bets by working towards several schools at once, which may be all well and good from the strategic standpoint, but does rather lead me to wonder if she is not simply prolonging the undergraduate portion of her university career.

I am in no position to say that there's anything wrong with that, beyond wondering if after 13 years of straight college schooling, being on that side of the classroom podium gets a little tedious.

She called maybe a dozen times between her first phone call, around 10:00 am, and her final phone call at around 7:00 pm. "How far is your town from this other town?" was the gist of most of her questions.

Not that she was coming to visit us, she explained carefully. She was just curious. Well, maybe she might come visit. Maybe not. Anyway, how far would it be? We mapped it out for her on google.

Sako uses the phone more than anybody I know. It's a thing for quick chats and random tangents. The flotsam and jetsam that wanders through her mind needs an outlet, and that outlet is usually whatever's on speed dial on her cell.

"Oh my God," she said when I picked up. "It smells like cow."

...which allowed us to pinpoint pretty much exactly where she was on her route.

"It's so disgusting," she said. "Do you think being able to smell themselves makes cows suicidal?"

"After a while, you actually get used to the smell and stop noticing it anymore."

"Ungh," she said, and hung up.

"I'm not coming to visit," she told us at 4 pm. "It's 3 hours out of my way, so I'm going to just keep going north. I can stop at Portland or something."

"Okay."

"Unless I do come to visit," she amended. "How far are you from where I am, again?"

Two hours later she called to inform me that she was tired of driving. "So I'm coming over," she said, "if that's okay." And: "How do I get there?"

The Guy walked her through the directions. It took three more calls.

"Your sister," Heisenburg said, wandering in during the second to last one, "has the directional sense of a pika."

"...what?"

"I like pikas," he said thoughtfully, and licked his whiskers. "They crunch."

"And where the hell have you been?"

He floated his tail into a question mark. "Here and there," he said airily. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in a mastodon skull?"

"What?"

"I suppose you don't have room here."

"Why the hell do you want a mastodon head?"

"Not a mastodon head. A specific mastodon skull. We hit it off. I felt like we really had something," he said with regret. "Like triscuits and soylent green. There were sparks. Oh well. Where's the goat? Never mind," he added pleasantly, as I opened my mouth. "I don't really care."

"A creationist mastodon skull," I said with outrage.

Heisenburg stared dreamily past me out the window. "I like creationism," he said. "It's salty." And he wandered out again while I tried to come up with an appropriately crushing retort.

I haven't heard hide nor hair of him since Sako left, so I suppose he hitched a ride up to Seattle with her. It's apparently going to snow up there. He ought to love that.