Carie Juettner

1,237 Miles in 42 Hours OR The Story of the Little Green Rock

Road Trips

My dad loves to take road trips. For him the phrase is literal. He simply likes to traverse the roads of Texas. There are destinations, but the path to get there is the real fun, full of photo opportunities and yellow and black diamond signs* and miles and miles of Texas scenery. There’s a lot of Texas, and my dad has seen most of it. Last year he completed his goal of visiting all 256 counties. Now, he’s trying to hit as many border towns as he can, outlining the state that he’s already pretty well filled in. But honestly, even if he’d traveled every highway and farm-to-market there is, seen all the cities and every ghost town in between, I still don’t think anything could keep him off the roads. He likes the drive, he likes the company, and he likes taking pictures of it all.

SignPicMonkey Collage — *About fifteen years ago, my dad and brother started “collecting” all the different yellow and black diamond road signs. They now have photos of over 2,000 of them. Any difference counts. For instance, none of the three signs above are the same. **Image from http://www.smartsign.com**

Happy Trails

This weekend, my husband and I accompanied my dad on one of his “quick trips.” The destination was Presidio, Texas, a border town of about 4,000 people, but there were plenty of stops and tangents to take along the way, both there and back.

On Thursday, my dad drove down to Austin with my mom from their home in Richardson. On Friday morning, Mom stayed at our house to pet sit for us while my dad, my hubby, and I hit the road at 7:00 A.M.

1,200 miles is a lot of road to cover, and we covered them fast in my husband’s Jetta (a.k.a. “the Jitney”). It would be impossible, or at least quite time-consuming, for me to share every sign and windmill and roadrunner that we encountered (there were many), but here are a few highlights from the trip:

A café called The Mercantile Garden on Main Street in Sonora—They have a sandwich called The Hobbit that hit the spot.
The Balmorhea State Park Pool—It wasn’t the right weather for trying out this spring-fed swimming hole, but it is definitely on my to do list now!
Buying some Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans in Fort Davis—Mark got black pepper, I got sausage and cinnamon, Dad got booger and vomit. Poor Dad.
The sunrise in Presidio—Beauty in every direction that Saturday morning.
Driving out to Ruidosa, TX to see what was there—The answer? Nothing really, except the Chinati Hot Springs, an unexpected oasis very much off the beaten path. I may have to take a writing retreat there someday.
Taking my first trip (via rowboat and burro) into Mexico—The hubby and I spent a couple of hours in Boquillas, just across the Rio Grande from Big Bend National Park. Dad, who doesn’t have a passport, waited for us on the Texas side. He and my brother took that rowboat journey in the mid-nineties when things at the border were less complicated.

The Story of the Little Green Rock

Traveling with my dad is fun. Having said that, it can also be a little painful. One common injury suffered on long road trips with him is a strained cornea due to all the eye-rolling you end up doing throughout the trip. The term “captive audience” is never more true than when you’re in a car, in the middle-of-nowhere-Texas, with no radio, no cell phone service, and no traffic in sight. Dad knows this. Dad uses these opportunities to tell stories.

Some of the stories are great—he tells old family tales and army anecdotes and talks about how the landscape has changed since he was a kid. Some of the stories are obvious jokes or outlandish lies, and those can be okay too. But some of the stories begin in one category before subtly sliding over into the other, and before you know it, you’ve been got. Trapped in the car on a lonely stretch of country road with not even a cow to commiserate with, you sigh and roll your eyes and push the accelerator a little closer to the floor.

This weekend, my dad told the story of the little green rock.

When my dad was a little kid, his family drove out to the Panhandle to visit his grandparents, Pap and Grandma. It was winter, and it had been a hard one in West Texas. The temperature was in the upper twenties and had been for days. The ground was frozen solid and icicles hung from the roof of the farmhouse.

Dad’s father and grandfather walked out into the pasture to check on the cattle, and my dad went with them. He was dressed in his warmest clothes, but it didn’t matter. That cold wind blew straight across those flat plains and right through him. He was shivering and wanted to go back to the house, but he wanted to stay with the men more, so he did.

While they were out walking that frozen ground, my dad looked down and saw a little green rock. It was shaped kind of a like an egg, but smaller, and very smooth. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Finally, the men turned to head back to the warmth of the house. My dad was more than ready to follow them.

When they got inside, they shrugged off their coats and their extra layers. My dad emptied his pockets, putting his little green rock on the table. They stoked the fire and got it going good, and everyone sat around thawing out and warming up.

After a few minutes, when the feeling had come back to my dad’s hands and feet and he was starting to feel alive again, he heard PHHFFFTT! He looked at the table and saw that his little green rock was gone.

It turns out, it wasn’t a rock at all. It was a frozen fart.

(I warned you. Be grateful you got the short version.)

The End

We left at 7:00 A.M. on Friday, spent the night in Presidio, and arrived back in Austin at 1:00 A.M. on Sunday morning. In the 42 hours that we were gone, we put 1,237 miles on the Jitney. Dad slept for a few hours and then he and Mom hit the road again, heading back up to Richardson before the bad weather arrived.

The whole thing was a whirlwind. Honestly, I probably won’t even remember it all until I see Dad’s pictures. (I didn’t take very many, but he did.) Some people probably can’t understand the point of a trip like that—so much driving (all done by my husband), so many hours in the car and so little time spent in any one location. But we covered a lot of ground and had some good conversations and kicked up a lot of dust behind the Jitney. We drank some coffee and collected some more yellow and black signs and learned a lesson about picking up little green rocks in winter.

To us, the trip was a success.

The All-Night-Work-A-Thon: A Photo Documentary

7:00 P.M. – It begins.

Tonight my husband has to work (at home) from 7 P.M. to 3 A.M. I’ve decided to stay up too, both for moral support and to (hopefully) accomplish some of my own tasks. My goals for the All-Night-Work-A-Thon are:

Finish reading Extra Lives by Tom Bissell.
Finish reading (and taking notes on) the 2013 Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market.
Revise my short story “No Guarantees.”
Write 750 words of something. (Ideally, the words would fit somewhere in my novel, but since I might be writing them at two o’clock in the morning, I am going to allow them to venture wherever they want to go.)

I’ve got my coffee. Let’s do this!

8:15 P.M. – Slow and steady.

I’ve completed two run-throughs of my short story, first my own edit and one then using the comments a writing buddy made on the manuscript. I still have one more set of comments from a second writing friend, but I need to take a break from the story for awhile. Time to open up the old Writer’s Market.

9:45 P.M. – Things fall apart.

First, the hubby asked me to stop singing so loudly and to turn down my music. (But it was the Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored,” and I do, I really do.) Then Toby, sensing that I was taking an unscheduled Twitter break, jumped onto my lap and started knocking pens off my desk. I evicted him from my office and took a restroom break. On the way back to my room, I shut my long flowy skirt in the bathroom door and made an animal-like yelp when I was unexpectedly wrenched backwards. The hubby had to ask me to keep it down again.

Taking a break from the Writer’s Market (and from Twitter and from Toby) to get back to my story revisions. Hoping things get better.

Midnight – Dealing with transitions.

It is midnight. I’ve fed the cats, put the dog to bed, and washed my face. I’ve switched from coffee to orange juice and traded my dangerous flowy skirt for sweats and a Superman t-shirt. I’ve worked hard on my short story. I am happy with the first fifteen pages (yes, it’s a long short story), but I’m still struggling with the ending. I’m having trouble making the transition to the final scene a seamless one. I want the final scene to seem seamless. I seem to seek seamless scenes. I am also getting sleepy.

I will take another break from my short story to read Extra Lives. Maybe something in the chapter about BioWare’s RPG Mass Effect will help me conclude my story about a little girl and her great-grandmother. Probably not, but maybe.

2:40 A.M. – The end is near.

[Sadly, my midnight and 2:40 A.M. photos were accidentally deleted from my blog and my computer. 😦 Big oops.]

I read all but one chapter of Extra Lives. I started reading this book to better understand the main character of my YA novel, but instead it’s helped me better understand my husband (who shouts/screams/grunts at his computer screen on a nightly basis) and also myself. I have played all of maybe two of the games mentioned in this book, but reading about these games has made me remember (and miss) the ones I grew up with, like Bubble Bobble and Jump Man and Lode Runner. (Expect a blog post about my gaming days on a night when I’m not so zombie-like.) I’ll save the last chapter for tomorrow.

I didn’t finish the Writer’s Market either. I went through all the book publishers and agents, but there are a few more articles I want to read.

And I never got back to my short story. The last five pages are still aglow with highlighted areas of mediocrity.

Oh yeah, and this blog post is the only other thing I wrote tonight, and it’s just shy of 750 words.

In summation, I completed none of my goals.

But that’s ok.

In real life, things always take longer to finish than you think they will when you see them on a to-do list. I worked hard tonight. I worked a long time, and I accomplished a lot, although I didn’t fully accomplish anything. And now I am very tired. I think, in some ways, there is joy in having pages left for tomorrow. There is purpose in pages. Then again, I might just take tomorrow off.

Goodnight/morning.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, my husband’s work went well too.)

Listen Up! Some Thoughts on Audio Books

I just recently discovered audio books.

Until now, my only experience with them had been in the classroom when I let the CD (or tapes back in the day) read to my students when I either had a sub or a sore throat. I’d never considered them for myself because A) I’m a paper book, feel the pages beneath my fingers, underline a sentence kind of girl and B) I’m easily distracted when it come to auditory things. I’ve tried listening to podcasts at home, and it goes something like this:

Hmm, this is really interesting… Ooo, look at that funny picture of a cat… Hey good for me, I cleaned out my whole closet! Um, what is that voice coming from my computer? Oh yeah…

Then, a few months ago, I went to the library to check out Pat Barker’s Regeneration for one of my book clubs, and the print copy was in use, but the audio copy was available, so I thought, what the heck. I put the first disc into my car’s CD player and hit play. Since then, I have listened to five audio books, pretty much back-to-back. I’m going to the library tomorrow to get another one.

What’s so great about audio books?

For me, the best thing about audio books is how much they improve every commute, errand, and solo road trip. Although I have trouble paying attention to stories when I’m at home in a room full of distractions, in the car my hands and eyes are occupied. Forced to be still, I can listen. And once I start listening, I really enjoy it.

Now, I look forward to getting in the car. I talk on the phone while driving much less than I used to. And I can easily balance two books at a time because they don’t overlap. One is for home, the other is for driving—there is never a choice to make about which one to read.

Have you heard anything good lately?

Of course, there are drawbacks. One is simply how to talk about them. I tell people that I “read” Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, though it feels a little counterfeit to use that verb. Then again, saying I heard it or listened to it doesn’t feel quite right either. It gives me the same sensation as hearing someone say they’re going out to see some music or watch a speech.

"Listen... do you smell something?" — “Listen… do you smell something?”

Another problem is not all audio books are not created equal.

For instance, Ann Patchett read Truth and Beauty herself, and it was wonderful. It was nice hearing a memoir in the author’s own voice. The rest of the novels were performed by other people. Jeff Woodman, who read John Green’s Looking For Alaska did an amazing job. Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, both by Pat Barker, were read by Peter Firth, and while he had a great voice, he often emphasized different words in the dialogue than I would have, causing me to have to hear the book twice, as if I were translating it in my head. (When we discussed those novels in my book club, I found that I had a completely different impression of some of the characters than the readers of the print version did.)

That’s not my complaint though. Obviously there is going to be some subjectivity in any reading. What bothered me was the variety of ways in which the CDs were produced.

In Regeneration, every track is roughly three minutes long;, resulting in 16-20 tracks per CD. In Truth and Beauty, there are only four to five long tracks per CD, which makes rewinding difficult. In Looking for Alaska, there are ninety-nine tracks per CD, which is kind of overkill. In Regeneration, the first and last track on each CD is an informative “This ends disc four” type of thing. But Patchett’s Truth and Beauty and Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke do not have those informative tracks. The CD simply starts over at the beginning, which can be very confusing. I’d be driving along thinking, Wait, they’re back in Scotland again? and then realize I was listening to a chapter I’d already heard. Looking for Alaska’s method of dealing with the CD switch is even more bizarre. This weird elevator music starts playing for the last thirty seconds of the CD, and it plays over the words. There are some pretty intense scenes in Looking For Alaska, and some of them do NOT lend themselves to upbeat background music.

I sat in my driveway for fifteen minutes with the car running to hear the end of Looking for Alaska.

So, having become a recent self-proclaimed authority on the subject, I have some advice for audio book producers.

5 Tips for Not Annoying Your Reader/Listener:

Keep tracks to three minutes or less. It makes it much easier for us to get back on track (no pun intended) when we accidentally zone out.
Include a conclusion track at the end of each CD, politely telling us to change the disc.
When a new disc begins, repeat the last sentence or two of the previous disc to help us ease back into the moment.
Ask all performers to read the books exactly the way I would read them. I’m sure that won’t be a problem. They can call me for advice if they need to.
Go ahead and give James Earl Jones, Susan Sarandon, Scarlett Johansson, and Zach Braff a heads up that I’ll be needing their services when I finish my novels because I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear my voice for eight hours.

Of course, the last tip I have about audio books is that you have to choose them carefully. I am still a paper book, feel the pages beneath my fingers, underline a sentence kind of girl at heart, and I do not recommend scribbling notes in journals while driving. When it comes to audio books, choose stories you want to read but don’t want to study. Choose books that will make your commute a pleasurable experience but which will not engross you so much that you zone out and end up twenty miles past your destination. There are books that can do that to you, trust me.