My secret thrill-landscape

I haven't met my new niece yet, she who was born just before Christmas. I plan to go, and I get this close || to buying the ticket, and then my heater breaks down or my I hear the death rattles coming from my car, and I have to deal with that first and then by the time I'm just about ready to contemplate buying a ticket again, something else happens. This is the way life works, I know, but sometimes it gets a little frustrating -- as wonderful as my house is, I recognize that it would be almost as wonderful, sometimes, to have the little budgetary cushions I used to have before I bought one.

All this is to say that my parents recently surprised me by buying me a ticket to Dallas recently (it was recently, did I say that?), leaving this Friday for a long weekend, so that the only thing I have to pay for is dog-boarding. Normally I'm of mixed feelings when my parents do things like this, but now, packing and checking the weather in Texas, I'm feeling nothing but unalloyed pleasure. I get to meet my niece! And even though I don't personally know her, I feel I can introduce her to you. Internet, meet my niece Gracie. Isn't she splendid?

Actually: almost as much as I'm looking forward to meeting her, specifically, I am just pleased to have an excuse to fawn all over a baby again. After years of college daycare tours of duty and post-college nannyhood, when I got to hold babies until I thought my arms might just fall off, I have experienced a sad dearth of cuddly babies in my life, and okay it is a little embarrassing how much I just love drooly, smelly babies with their soft skin and grippy hands and such but I can't help it and now I have one whom I can unashamedly monopolize all weekend long and I am so happy I can hardly stand it.

Now if only I can spend the whole airport time writing Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fanfiction, I will consider it a perfect weekend.