I was writing so much for the first few days I stalled out a bit. I've been telling myself, the last two days, that I have too much to do, or had done too much already that day, and I didn't have to write. This kind of reasoning is why, in a couple shoeboxes in the closet of my room, I've got four old diaries that I started at various times and abandoned after a month or so. And I type even more slowly than I write in longhand...

But I'm not going to poop out on this blog. Not after an ignominous three entries. When I left off, Friday night, I was in Palm Springs. (Gosh, I feel like Scherazade. Or possibly a Victorian serial-story writer. Too bad no one's reading this except me...) When I woke up the next morning I was still in Palm Springs, obviously (bad phrasing there, Tess) and it was, in fact, the morning. Normally I don't like to get up till the glare is off the day, but I do make exceptions.

We were all meeting for breakfast. Normally I don't do breakfast. But there were crisp white tableclothes, and towering flower arrangements in silver thingamagigs (there's a word for it, starts with an "e" and is probably French, but I don't care enough to look it up) and exotic fruits carved in fanciful designs. I figured it was probably some kind of sin to stay upstairs sleeping while, downstairs, ice sculptures drip water onto the lox and cream cheese set out for your delectation.

Anyway, there we all were, looking at the ice sculptures and the flowers and the chattering tourists, shredding croissants into little feathery fragments and actually eating very little. We were all affected by that dull gloom you get when you've had plenty of sleep without having been terribly tired when you went to bed. It's like a haze in the morning air, (yet another reason why I don't like mornings) and sometimes it burns off with the sun. Sometimes it just gets more overcast.

It took all of my teen years to realize that you really do feel much worse, in this mood, if you go with your inclinations and stay inside to mope. With a consciousness that I sounded like the more annoying kind of summer camp counselor, I suggested we get some fresh air. The Joshua Tree National Monument was supposed to be a great place to hike.

There was some confusion. After I explained to Sebastian that "monument" didn't, in this case, mean any kind of marble statue or pillar or many-staired building, but just a lot of desert to wander around in, he looked at me as though I were mad and asked why anyone would go, then. (He was also disappointed at there not being a cathedral in Cathedral City. Actually, so am I. Kind of.) Mia said she wasn't really a hiking sort of person either.

So Mark and I drove out, with a packed lunch we had gotten from the hotel and a ton of water. Mark started by complaining about all the water, and the fact that he was going to have to carry half of it, but I told him if he collapsed from heat stroke and dehydration that he'd just have to wait for rescue by the park rangers because I wasn't going to try dragging him. He didn't shut up till he was through his second bottle. He wore long pants, as usual, having some unlikely ideas about snakes being more frisky in hot weather, and I took my black paper parasol.

In general we had a very enjoyable day. Of course it was hotter than hell, but after the fuss the day before it was nice to have nothing to deal with that was more supernatural than Mark's sunburned ears. (There's always somewhere he forgets to put sunscreen. Last time we went to the beach it was the backs of his hands, and at Disneyland he lost his hat after 20 minutes and burned his scalp where his hair parts.)

We got very solemn about the beauty of the desert, and talked about the notion of Nature-as-the-sublime in Romantic literature. I did, anyway, and Mark said something about "A Sentimental Journey" which was meant to be sarcastic and might have succeeded if I'd minded being compared to Laurence Sterne. Which I don't. And he took lots of doubtless very fine photos, and I laughed at the silly positions he assumed to take them. There was one which involved standing on one foot leaning over a boulder and I nearly fell down myself, I was shaking so hard.

And we got lost driving back. Which meant that we got a little cranky with each other, but ended up being a good thing because we got to see the windmill field after dark. You wouldn't believe the view, with the sun setting behind you, and the stars coming out above, and in front of you and to the side the pale blue lights flashing to warn passing planes, and in a linee off in the distance the thousand thousand orange and red lights of the desert cities. Although I'm still not sure how we got that far west...

There are a million chi-chi restaurants in the desert, though a lot of them close down for the summer. The one we went to (obviously Mark and I changed first) had dramatic gouts of flame welling up at strategic intervals from the patio tile (which probably would've been niftier in the winter) and a big rock-filled fountain inside the restaurant. The appetizers came out on a big gilded banana leaf. Well, on a plate made to look like...you probably got that. Sebastian and Mia were sort of dragging around, and barely touched their dinners. The weather wasn't agreeing with them, and even worse was the contrast between the real climate and all the unnatural landscaping. Pansies and peonies planted for less than a week before they wilted, and were replaced by new, fresh flowers. It is kind of subliminally upsetting: temperate flowers in a heat that makes your face numb. It just feels wrong, around the edges of reality.

And then, walking back to the hotel, we ran into Criseyde Keats. She was accompanying some very, very drunk holidaying Germans and were headed for the next nearest bar. Criseyde, who was, for reasons known only to herself, dressed and illusioned-up as a Playboy Bunny, called out to me and Mark from across the street. (We probably wouldn't have recognized her otherwise...aside from not being a snake from the waist down, she'd changed her hair from auburn-with-green-streaks to blond and given herself a few cups sizes in the chest.) One of the drunks took offense at the familiar way she had her arm around Mark, and we had some difficulty getting away...especially as Criseyde couldn't decide whether she wanted us to join them or not (if she had decided she wanted us, I don't flatter myself that I would've been able to say no...or, indeed, to pay for my share of the tab by the end of the night). Finally she settled on a promise to visit us sometime soon, and went off swinging hips that she doesn't really have. The drunk Germans stumbled behind.

"That's it," said Mia. "We're leaving tomorrow morning. I didn't know you knew a lamia," she said to me, looking as though her opinion of me had been higher before that revelation.

"Ivy introduced us," Mark and I said at the same time. That was unanswerable, but Mia still had a snarky expression when we got back to the hotel, and Sebastian still looked a particular kind of thoughtful.

But as they got on the plane Sunday afternoon, Mia and I were teary and we all hugged and made vague promises to keep in touch. "I'm so glad you came. It was a dreadful idea but you two made it better," said Mia, Sebastian's arms wrapped around her shoulders. I'm not sure this was really true, but it was a nice thing for her to say and allowed us all to leave as friends.

I think maybe in some cases it's easier to stay friends at a distance. In the future I'll remember this, or at the very least think out the plans for a visit more thoroughly beforehand. Not that I had a bad time, myself. But now I've got to prepare myself for Criseyde coming by, at some date and time unspecified. I'd better get out some aspirin.