One of the things no one bothered to tell me when I became a mother is that I wouldn’t be able to drive anymore.

I don’t mean drive, I mean really drive. Before I had children, my goal was to see the whole of America from the windshield of a car. When I first got my license, I’d go to the grocery store at night and dream of getting on I-95 and just going; going deep into the belly of black unknown West and not stopping until the earth below my tires did.

I dreamed of running, of never looking back, of having nothing more in my head than wind and sunshine. I dreamed of going to the places people didn’t go and taking pictures of the things people tried to forget. But once you have kids, you don’t get to run anymore. You don’t get to find what’s been forgotten. Or, more accurately, you stop wanting to.

But before I had kids, even though I never did anything before I had kids….I never had a career and never went to a tropical island and never had a honeymoon and hardly managed to ever have a boyfriend, I got to drive. And that I did. I drove for stupid reasons; because I wanted a cheesesteak real bad, because I thought I could salvage a “relationship” that so belongs in quotation marks, I can’t even tell you, because my friend asked me to drop her off at her dorm in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho, because I wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing over the thump-thump-thump of The Offspring, because I’d never been to Graceland, because I had to go crabbing in the Chesapeake one last time.

That’s everywhere I’ve been by car. View If By Sedan in a larger map

I quit jobs to drive. I ended relationships to drive. I broke entire cars to drive. I violated so many laws to drive, I…well, I plead the 5th.

And then I had three kids and quit mostly everything for that.

Well, I did attempt a Denver to Durango trip with the boys when they were 2 and 4, and let’s just say that the 5 1/2 hour drive turned into 9 hours, and I turned into a shrew. Shrew would be a very generous word.

Four years ago, I packed an 8 year old, a 6 year old and a one year old into my 1997 Subaru Wagon and we drove the 23 hours from Denver to Vancouver to visit baby daddy for Father’s Day. We are back together now partly because he’s hot but mostly because there was no way in hell I was ever getting back in that car again. I still have nightmares.

And then, a few weeks ago, Chevy invited me and mine to borrow a car and drive to Dallas to visit Great Wolf Lodge. We haven’t seen any of Texas beyond Taco Bell (do you know how hard it is to find a Taco Bell in Canada?) (Do you know how much we’re making up for that fact now?) so we took them up on their offer and went.

Dude. The Road. That sweet call. It’s back.

Maybe it’s back because cars have changed in the past thirteen years and your kids can pretty much forget you exist in the back of one now, or maybe it’s just back because, as these things go, I’m starting to remember who I was before I had kids. Maybe I’m ready to start running into my life, not from it, wherever it is that’s going to take me. I think I’m starting to become less Their Mom and more My Own Person again.

This is equally as exciting as it is depressing as all shit.

The whole recap of the GM trip to Great Wolf Lodge is on my Blog De’ Revue.

You know what happens when you decide to be that asshole American who’s all, “If you people elect Bush again, I’m so totally moving to Canada”, and then you DO IT? Karma sees fit to deport your ass straight to his backyard, that’s what.

But if you’ve been really good at some point in your life, even if you can’t exact think of one single thing that would qualify you for karmic goodness, but it has to be there because karma decides to dish you out some goodness, you can at least get deported straight back to the backyard of the president you never had very kind words for which also happens to be occupied by all of the bloggers.

Or at least the comments on the last post tell me so. So for all of you who left nice words; thank you. For all of you in HOUSTON who left nice words; thank you, and I’m sorry I didn’t respond to every one of you like I meant to, but I just plain suck right now.

Also, I’m taking your asses up on it.

December 4th, downtown Houston, you, me and happy hour. Details are here. Be there or be somewhere else entirely.

But really, please just be there.

***Completely unrelated***

When I was 11 or 12, I sat in my bathroom sink one night with a roll of scotch tape and a bottle of Elmer’s glue and I tried, so hard, to find a way to make that tape sticky enough to put on my nose and yank out all of that crap clogging my little bitty pores.

I could be a kagabazillionaire right now, but then I’d be knee deep in the business of other people’s snow-capped miniature paper-mache forests, and not wasting everyone’s time changing the world as a blogger.

So I became a blogger. And met a guy named Jim. And we talked about opening a kids martial arts/UFC style studio, because he likes it and my kids like it and my husband likes it, but then we remember that someone had done that, too, and it didn’t end so well for the asian guy.

And then we had the epic idea to start a line of kids cooking utensils, because yeah, someone really should do that, except someone already did do that, but our kids did start a kids review blog and no kid has ever done that before and the people who made the kids cooking stuff gave them some to test and the resulting carnage is right here.

The day before I left Canada, I went into my Safeway, just to say goodbye. There were hugs and tears and well-wishes. Man, I love those girls at my Safeway.

Now that I think about it, many of my most meaningful relationships have been forged in grocery store check-out lanes. It’s where I spend most of my time. I do what I have to.

So tonight I had to run into the grocery store by the hotel, which is either spelled HEB or H-E-B or H.E.B., I’m not totally sure, but they make the best cannoli I’ve eaten outside of Brooklyn, and I don’t know any of these people yet. I don’t know what check-out lane Audrey works in on Sunday night, or which day Dallas works the customer service counter, so I don’t yet know which lane to use for which trip to the store.

I hop into the express lane with my four items and get to the check-out and hand over my purchases to the guy, because they were all guys, and what the hell are the odds of having only men checkers at the grocery store the exact night I am buying only one wine key, Tampax, Kotex and a box of Apple Jacks?

This is how it goes in my world. All the time.

So I say to the guy, “Sorry for making you touch all that stuff, dude” and he says, “Oh, it’s okay, but I have to admit…the wine key is kind of throwing me here.” And I turn all sorts of red and nervously cackle a little and don’t at all make eye contact with the guy again when I shell out my $13.48, which is actually a pretty good price for 20 tampons, 30 pads, a kitchen tool, some sugar coated food coloring and a single serving slice of utter humiliation.

I grab my bag and mumble a rushed “thank you” in his general direction and get about 2.58 steps away when I realize that I am physically incapable of leaving it like that, so I stop, look back over my shoulder, and with an over-exaggerated wink say, “And just so you know, it’s the Apple Jacks you ought to have been worried about.”

And I’ll never, ever go into that store ever again.

Orange is my favorite color, and that’s why I love fall.

I love fall because the air is thick with the smell of burning wood. In the fireplace way, not the Californageddon way.  I love fall because I don’t have to shave my legs, ever, and I get to break out my fuzzy socks. I kind of have a thing for socks. Bet you didn’t know that.

I love fall because it’s laced with traditions. We go back to school; lunch boxes are lined up on the counter every day, story time and dinner time and shower time and bed time all happen on schedule. We let go of the hap-hazard, fly by the seat of our pants summer days and we pack up the pastels and the florescents in exchange for the earth tones. My little green eyed babies, my one blue eyed boy with olive skin, they look so beautiful in shades of green and brown snuggled around their necks that it hurts to look at them sometimes. My husband rushes home on his early nights to fill our house with the grunts and the woots! that football season brings. Beers are cracked, crotches are scratched, and the men take over for a while.

The first truly cold day of the year is coming, and that means the first pot of chili and the first batch of cornbread are imminent. Fall means that you can watch a season crawl across the planet, inching towards you, leaving dustings of snow on the highest mountaintops that it passes in its slow decent to earth.

I love fall because, rather than shoving and screaming at each other for the good tv spot, or the stool in the washroom, my children stumble down the stairs in the morning, huddle together under a blanket, and stare silently into the flames from the fireplace warming their little toes and noses awake. We spend more time on the floor in the fall, because we can’t resist the fire. We eat dessert on the floor, lay on our tummies and play on the floor, hold each other and read stories in front of the fire.

I need the fall to prepare for the winter. The cold will come, the snow will fall, and I’ll hide inside until it stops and life resumes. Fall is my dose of life before the world hibernates, and I with it. And the pumpkin spice latte is back, which is really as close to godliness as you can get.

I’m curious….what’s your favorite season? And why?

Because bricks are quite handy. You can throw them at thy foes, you can trip over them, breaking your big toe and getting to use the crutches that you’ve always thought everyone looked so cool using, and all you have to suffer through is some armpit chaffing. Also, a broken big toe. You can deliver that crucial memo from the 14th story of your office building to the 3rd story of your office building with lightening-fast efficiency by using nothing more than a $0.002 rubber band and any old brick you find laying around. Or kill your boss. Either way, you’ll be in line for a promotion.

I like bricks. More specifically, I liked aesthetically pleasing configurations of bricks. Did you know that I once had an aptitude for and a very promising career rut carved out for me in mechanical engineering? True story. You wouldn’t believe what I could do with a ruler. In fact, if I had enough balls to go digging through my storage closet that is most likely, by now, host to 3 out of 5 of Canada’s most deadly spiders, also my Christmas decorations, I’d be able to find a stack of old blueprints with, like, 1990 written in the date. And drawn in pencil. *gasp* See, back in the stone ages when I was dipping my pen in the blueprint ink, people still used drafting tables and mechanical pencils and T-squares. Now there are twenty four versions of Autocad out there. I once bought Autocad for Dummies, thinking it might be fun to try my hand at it again, and I couldn’t understand the acknowledgments page of the book.

You know, it’s kind of messed up that the very same people who can doodle out an entire city, or an aircraft, or a satellite in their spare time can’t think of a way to make the lead in mechanical pencils stronger than a dried spaghetti stick.

An then I married an Ivy League architecture major and we’ve been happily employed in the restaurant industry ever since. At least my wasted education was free.

But we do both find ourselves drawn to the linear. The only pictures we have hanging in our living room are of houses, or parts of them. My bathroom has a big ass schematic of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging in it. All of the furniture is square and all of the frames are level. We’re sort of neurotically straight, actually. The clutter all over every square inch of our lives offsets it nicely, though.

I also find myself, on occasion, taking pictures of buildings. I’m normally a portrait sort of girl; I wouldn’t take a picture of grass or water drops unless there was someone in it. Every know and then, however, I find some building that strikes my fancy and I can’t help myself but shoot it. Like in Mexico, when I found a cathedral with this entrance.

I actually love the fact that there’s a big, fat thumb smudge right in the middle of that picture, so shut up. There’s this building that I stumbled across in Chicago this summer.

Pretty freaking cool, isn’t it? There’s this shot of the Chinese Gardens in downtown Vancouver, and I love it because I can’t decide if it’s the very essence of serene or if it’s the fucking creepiest sort of “crawling out of these trees to get you” picture.

Either way, I’ll take it. My neighbor Anjou took this one in Cairo, but it’s all rights reserved so if you want to see it, you’ll have to click. It’s totally worth it.

And this one I love, I love so much, because if there’s anything I appreciate more than gorgeous detail, it’s religious irony.

But holy crap is that every gorgeous. Even if it is in abject defiance of the second commandment.