willowisp | An Unexpected Visit

I've mentioned my friends Steve and Hawk before, though at the moment I'm too lazy to go back and find prior posts. Someday I will, and tag them. For now, I'll recap. Steve and Hawk are itinerant workers whose home base is upstate NY. They work very often in Arizona, and when they do they always try to stop and visit on the way to/from. They travel with their two very large but gentle English mastiffs. The unfortunate part of their work is that they often have zero notice, so at best we get three days' warning when they're driving from NY and often get same day notification when they're traveling from AZ.

They passed through in late September and expected the outage to be about a month, and so yesterday in the afternoon I got a call that they'd be rolling through. They expected to get here late at night, which I interpreted to be midnight or later, so I threw the guestroom sheets in the wash, cleaned up the most egregious messes from when the cats were sick earlier this week, and set up the dishwasher for a sixish hour run with the coffee pot in it.

They got here at about 9; Steve had misremembered how long the drive took. Oopsie. Luckily the sheets washed and dried rather more quickly so they didn't need to wait until then to go to bed. When they arrived

callicrates was still at work, but he closed down and came home. He still had work to do, so the three of us went out to dinner at a rare open-late restaurant in ABQ and brought Andy home one of his favorite things from there.

Meanwhile, Athena and Princess, the dogs, had decided to play "chase me" with Heidi and Sean when they first got here and the kitties, to put it mildly, were not amused. They sat up on the upstairs half-wall, and Sean even growled occasionally. The cutest thing, though, was that Heidi had made her home base on top of the stuffed bears who decorate the half wall. During dinner they put the dogs in their guest bedroom so the pooches didn't mess up some clean laundry on the couch.

After we got back and let the dogs romp a bit more (and eat Steve and Hawk's leftovers), Steve and Hawk and Andy and I chatted for a bit while we waited for the sheets to finish drying. They did, for the record, offer to stay in a hotel since Andy is allergic to dogs. I'm hoping the allergy shots he's been getting were helping out. Once they went to bed and the dogs were shut in the guest room, Heidi came down from her perch by herself, but I had to retrieve Sean.

Andy ended up pulling an all-nighter, so at about two I went to bed. Sean perched on me for a minute or two, then retreated to our shelves, where he spent the whole night, as far as I could tell. But before settling in he knocked Andy D Bear off and sat in his spot. I consider that a statement. Heidi seemed mostly normal as soon as the guest room door was shut throughout the visit.

This morning we all went to *$ for breakfast before Andy headed off yet again to work. Steve, Hawk, and I chatted until about one, and then they left. Heidi came down off the bookshelves as soon as I told the kitties the dogs were gone. Sean finally came down at about 2:30. Both kitties have been Velcro™ since.

The visit itself was a lot of fun. Andy and I both love dogs, and getting the pooch fix was nice; I just hope it didn't affect Andy too badly. Steve and I tend to disagree politically, which leads to interesting (but never more than teasingly antagonistic) conversations. Hawk is very quiet; whenever I asked her if we were boring her she would say she was just listening. When she does talk, though, she has interesting things to say, and she and I have a lot in common. She's reservation-born Apache, and although she is usually circumspect on that part of her life, I've managed to learn a lot from her. They stayed longer than they usually do since they don't have their next job lined up yet, which was nice. Plus, we get to see them in two weeks or so, which is a nice change from not having any idea when next we'll meet up.