Why aren't there two l's in 'traveling'?

There is a lot to update. I've been waiting for a chance since a week before last Thursday (July 1st), when I had my battery adventure. Thursday went like this: take lots of eye pressure readings on the cats at work, fail to realize that phone is turned off all day, receive call at end of day that my grandfather has passed. Try to imagine how this will affect travel plans for the 4th of July or afterwards - Audrey tries to leave to go to a rehearsal, but can't because the car battery is completely and inexplicably dead. Tommy finds a bus route that goes to Walmart and Sams, and buys a new car battery, then Tommy remembers how heavy car batteries are and wishes the bus stopped a little closer to my house. Battle with corrosion on the battery attacher thingies and finally get a closed circuit with power!

Meanwhile, it sounds like the funeral will be either the 9th or 10th of July. As it stands, we are to travel to Missouri to be with Audrey's family on the 2nd (tomorrow from battery day) and stay through the 4th to blow things up, then return the 5th. Should we return as planned, then fly to Florida for the funeral? Should I fly alone because airfare is too expensive? OR, should we extend our Missouri road trip to include Florida? It took until sometime on the 4th, and some price shopping of airlines on a borrowed laptop outside a pub with free wifi, but we ended up deciding to drive. Luckily, we'd thought ahead and packed dress clothes for a funeral at the last minute back on the 1st, just in case we ended up deciding that.

Ed and Audrey (Ed is also married to an Audrey) took Puck while we were in Florida, and lent us a pack and play. We stayed, instead of a hotel, with a friend of my parents, Miss Duffy. She was awesome, and her house was awesome, and the whole trip went about as well as a trip to a funeral could possibly go. I heard a lot of perspectives of my grandfather that I'd never had. I had little spots of memories of him as I grew up, because we never actually lived near him. Once I managed to live in the same town, he was already declining and wasn't really himself, and didn't remember who I was all that often. In any case, I learned more about him, things that fell into place around the memories I did have.

Audrey and I (and Audrey and Ed, and Mike and Miranda and Frank) went to the preview night of The Producers, which we knew many many people involved in, and it was immensely funny, an appreciated jolt of endorphines.

As an extended family, we went blueberry picking. Last summer we went cherry picking in Michigan, so this seemed to fit pretty well. We even met the guy who used to cut Audrey's hair, who closed his salon to help out his parents at their blueberry farm. Also neat: they have a big pond of Tilapia that poop fertilizer into the water, which is then used for irrigating the blueberries - a trick I thought was eco-brilliant.

Then we drove back, a two-day affair, and here I am back at my computer again, with enormous backlogs of e-mail at work and at home. Overall, I am incredibly impressed with my 1, 6, and 7 year olds for taking all this traveling in stride and only very occasionally being difficult to share a car with.