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Took Trinity to the St. Louis Art Museum to see the last day of the Ming Dynasty exhibit. She’s loved archeology since she was about five. Jon and I like it, but it’s one of her serious things, so we do our best to encourage it. Nothing wrong with a kid who loves museums, art, history, and will spend a day looking at any of the above. Unless there’s weapons or armor involved she’ll actually stay longer in an art museum than we want to stay, but it’s just a matter of degrees. We all love a good museum.

Problem with this trip to the museum was it was the last day of the exhibit. I thought we had more time next week, but double checked and this was the very last day. We’d planned to go anyway, but it suddenly become more imperative to take Trinity today. We learned that if we didn’t make it by four this afternoon we would miss the cut-off for tickets. We had all day; no problem. I went over to my office for an hour before we needed to grab lunch and head that way. Do you guys see the problem? I didn’t. An hour later I was writing great guns. The story was so hot I could barely type fast enough to keep up with my muse, my imagination, and my thoughts. Thank Gods, I type around 200 words a minute. It’s the only thing that allows me to keep up with myself. Jon finally has the computer fast enough to keep up with the speed. I spent years typing too fast for the cursar to keep up, and having to wait while it blinked at me and the words finally caught up. Today was one of those magical days when the muse hits and you just hold on and type. It was great, amazing, but we had a deadline that was immovable. If we missed it we disappointed our kid. Not acceptable. So, we cut it close before we left so that I could finish the rush of pages. It turned out to be only ten pages, sometimes in these rushes it’s more, but ten is great in such a short space of time. What we hadn’t planned for was the traffic in Forest Park where the Art Museum is located.  It was a freaking parking lot.

It was a beautiful day so a lot of people had come to the park. It was the Shakespeare festival and people had come for that, and people were packing the museum because it was the last day of the exhibit. We sat in traffic with the minutes ticking away. Thirty minutes of traffic with only one more turn between us and the street that the museum was on, and we were down to less than twenty minutes to make the ticket cut-off. I finally said, "Stop let Trin and I off and we’ll get tickets. You get there when you can." He agreed, we got out and we began the half mile walk. Downside was that my ankle had been particularly painful today. It had taken me several tries to find a pair of boots that made the ankle feel better, but didn’t encase my leg in leather from ankle to knee on a summer’s day. I was wearing my New Rock flame boots, which I love, but they couldn’t give my ankle enough support to do a forced march for half a mile, mostly up hill.  Trin began to run, and I had to say, "I can’t run." My ankle was letting me know that there was no way to run if I wanted to walk without a limp later. Very frustrating as I kept checking my watch. By the time we got to the building, Jon passed us going the opposite way. He’d apparently found another road to take. We waved at each other and Trin and I charged up the steps to get tickets. We got them for all three of us. Jon and I talked on the cell phones. He said, "Go without me. I’ll just wait. I can’t find parking anywhere."

My reply, "No, you don’t understand. It’s a huge line. We aren’t moving. They’re staying open late until six to make sure everyone gets through the exhibit. You don’t want to drive around for two hours."

Jon said, he’d try to find parking, and we got in line. He did get to join us finally, and we were still in line so it worked out. Trinity loved the exhibit. My ankle did not. Frankly, Jon and I were not as in love with the exhibit as Trin was, but she’s a very glass half full person and we’re not. Before we complain about the exhibit, I’m going to sleep on it and see if what seemed like huge problems are really huge or just pain, tiredness and frustration talking. So, for now, we got it all accomplished, but we ended taking me without lunch, so I didn’t eat again until six, and I still have other work due. I have interview questions which were due today and now that my ankle has gone from a sharp pain to a dull ache I’m at my desk again. I just want to go to bed, but the interview is due for one of the foreign publishers and so I’ll stop blogging and get back to work.