I want to get me a good night's sleep

[austin_dern]

There was a little coda to the trip, the day after we got home. We had to get to bunny_hugger's parents' home so we could pick up our pet rabbit. He was well and only spent a couple of days sulking about having been dislodged from his main home, this time. You know pets like this. We spent a good time snacking and talking and describing what the trip was like when bunny_hugger's brother and his girlfriend got back from wherever it was exactly they'd gone out that day. They had been staying with bunny_hugger's parents when they weren't up north and had returned, if I have this right, later in the evening, after leaving the tavern, rather than spend another night camping.

We all went out, in two cars, to a Mexican restaurant in the area (and now I'm reminded that bunny_hugger's brother and girlfriend declined to try out the Chinese-Thai place we recommended in Suttons Bay, nominally on the grounds that places which do two types of food don't do either very well, which might be a sound guiding principle in Brooklyn but this wasn't Brooklyn); if I remember this right, we'd actually all more or less figured on going to another Mexican restaurant and somehow ended up at this one instead. We like them both anyway.

And we were all having a great time sharing the experiences with bunny_hugger's parents, until both her brother and his girlfriend started feeling sick. They'd come in a separate car, so they were able to leave, and get back home before anything catastrophic happened. The rest of our meal wasn't so fun, though, and I think the waiter looked curiously at the remains of our party.

We returned to her parents' home and talked some more, including some speculation about what they might be sick with. (They were recovered enough to not think they were particularly contagious for the others on their plane flight home, at least.) Her brother came downstairs, groggy, to mention that while they were trying to sleep, the way the vents in the house were, pretty much every word we said went right up into their ears, so we promised to continue having a passive-aggressive conversation about them. He was good with that.

So we spent some more time, and tried to comfort the dogs --- who are always nervous but were more so what with me being around and what with these ill people upstairs --- and finally took our pet rabbit and went home. He hopped into his cage and declared that he was never ever going to leave again ever. He was wrong, of course.

Trivia: Gravesend, Brooklyn, was the first western New World settlement founded by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody (an Anabaptist exiled from the Massachusetts Bay colony as a ``dangerous woeman''), accepted by the Dutch to settle southwestern Long Island. Source: The Island at the Centre of the World, Russell Shorto.

Currently Reading: Technology in Postwar America: A History, Carroll Pursell. (I had expected a basically pop-history-of-science piece about inventions in America 1945-60 or so; it's actually a more academic study of American and world culture and technological development, from stuff like indoor bathrooms to suburbs to atomic power plants, and how they affected not just lifestyles but how people saw their lifestyles. I'm impressed by the book and also that I got it from the city library, not the university library.)