The Way I See It

September 28, 1994

The pregnancy test came back negative. The embryos hadn't implanted. This was very bad news, considering the time and money we'd spent to make it work (seven months, $11000), but Miimii took it harder than I did. She cried for days and was miserable. I tried to concentrate on the move ahead.

Miimii hated Spokane, Washington, so, on September 28, 1994, we left for our new home at Langley AFB, in Hampton, Virginia. We drove eight days, covering 2921 miles with two cars. I drove the Red Civic Hatchback in lead position, and she drove the more comfortable 4-door Civic which had air conditioning and cats. I shot this photo of her (headlights on) as we left Spokane for the last time.

September 29, 1994

The cats didn't like the drive much, so we bought drugs from the vet and tranquilized them (and had a lot of fun "testing" the drugs on them around the house). Still, Miimii said Lunch was practically singing, sometimes for an hour at a time, repeating little meow patterns in the back seat cat carrier. It sounded like cat blues. Moo, in her own carrier, was sound asleep, sometimes on her back (she liked sleeping on her back). Every night, they got a new motel room to sniff. It appears from this shot in a South Dakota motel, that the girls might need some more tranquilizers.

Although Miimii was very afraid she'd be too tired to drive an average of 350 miles a day for eight straight days, even though we'd done, at times, 800 miles a day for three days straight, she eventually found it was pretty easy (duh). We drove right past Evansville, Indiana, on our way to Virginia and decided to drop in on the old people I call my parents.

October 4, 1994

This is the man who did something awful to my mother in 1965 and caused her to give birth to me, otherwise known as Daddy. He was three days past his 64th birthday and looking for some food. I told him he couldn't eat Moo, but he persisted, so I had to slip him some cat tranquilizers in his morning bowl of Captain Crunch. Here he sizes up his meal while Moo, slightly uncomfortable as always, looks on, wanting to taste some Indiana cuisine (frightened bugs). Moo is the only cat I've ever seen too uncoordinated to catch a bug. She would just frighten them so badly for so long that they'd have little heart attacks. We'd find dead bugs, perfectly intact, lying around, and proud Moo, thinking she was a REAL predator.

I snapped this shot of my beloved Daddy, Richard. Shortly afterward I got him down on the floor, put my knee in his back, pried his jaw open, and dropped five cat tranquilizers down his throat. That was tough. I tried to drop them in his cereal, but he sniffed it and ate around them.

This is one of my favorite photos of the old people in their natural habitat. Miimii and I tossed the animals into the car (they bounced a little) and backed out of the driveway as the old people looked on (shaking a little because they were so old), and then we were on our way to Virginia, our new home.

To our credit, in the 2921 miles driven, Miimii and I never lost each other once. Every night we looked at the next day's maps, and I had the exit number to the next motel, along with the phone number of that motel. We also kept our headlights on and Miimii had tied little red flags to our antenna. When someone sqeezed in between us, knowing how horrible it is for an American driver to be forced to drive slow, I decreased my speed, and that pesky intruder would always pass me, and allow Miimii to catch up. This, like our 'let's have a baby' adventure in Seattle, was a time when I felt especially close to Miimii, because we worked together as a team towards a common goal. Once we made it to Virginia, that teamwork quickly faded.

Old friends (stand in the front yard like bookends)>>>

October 21, 1994

We arrived on the evening of October 5th, and our first impression was,"yuck!!!" It's since improved to, "Whatever".

I caught a throat infection from all the air blowing in my face from my car vents, which had no A/C. I got worse and by the time we arrived in Virginia, I had the flu. It hurt a lot. I was face down in bed for a long time. It lasted for 16 days until one of the Air Force doctors decided to give me pain killers (duh) even though I'd been requesting them for weeks. I recovered overnight.

Virginia wasn't much to look at. The Hampton Roads area was crowded, full of nasty drivers, and the people just looked unhealthy (lots of fat smokers). Years later, a national survey concluded that, next to New Orleans, Norfolk, part of Hampton Roads, was the fatest city in the country. I coped...the ugly people didn't bother me so much, but the drivers did. Miimii loved it there.

This is our new home in Grafton, Virginia (also known as Yorktown, Virginia). Grafton Station apartments...we went from a 1046 square foot house to an 875 square foot apartment (see red arrow). In our welcome packet, the Grafton Station Apartments were the furthest from Hampton on our list, so we decided to stay there because of that. Says a lot about what we thought of Hampton! Still, it was also one of the nicer apartments we'd looked at.

October 1994