I woke up to the sunshine filtering in through my window, creating prisms on the bed and opposite wall through crystal pieces hanging within the window.

I drifted in and out of sleep later in the morning, as I suspected that the salesman at the car lot was fit to be tied by the banksters at Wells Fargo who didn't care that I have a job to attend to back at home and that the salesman had a job complicated by the interstate nature of the car purchase. Besides, this was an opportunity of quiet time working on my daily trip journal, which I hope you've enjoyed thus far. I'm still a couple of days behind. Poor Panna slept, slept, and slept. This has been a heck of an adventure with its ups and downs, and it is tiring when you have to deal with me in my current car situation and my tendency to experience cascading failures in certain situations like my car situation in the past, my scout restoration, failure to find a job in my chosen careers after going to school, never mind staying in a career during a bull market collapse like the tech bust of 2001. So, Panna needed her beauty rest.

So, once she was rested up, she called me out of my journal writing to say that there had been an update in the continuing drama of the final terms of the loan, leaving us with a couple of details to be cleared up. I discussed some other personal things in my life and what could happen to myself and family (as well) in the intermediate and long-term outlook of this country.

Panna heard thunder coming, so she suggested packing up into the car in case the salesman called, but the storm beat me to it, and I left my things staged by the front door while the weather went wild around us.

It was wild, wet, and windy weather. Trees were swaying heavily (which you could hear as the branches and leaves brushed each other in the very high winds), leaves blowing sideways, sharp, percussive, and solidly rumbling thunder felt through the pine floors almost like someone was hammering the floor with a light hammer near your feet, rain driven sideways and all the way to the front sliding glass floor (opening it and feeling the flying mist) from one windward side of the porch to the leeward side and maybe dropping ONE foot in that distance. The driven rain was VERY cold, and it was very, very cool outside. We moved to all the windows, pushing them down to just a crack to keep the rain out. There wasn't a lot of lightning, though.

During this time, Panna felt it was time to do a smudging. Sage is used as an herb for the purification process, which is burned in a handheld vessel and the smoke fanned with a feather fan. Native Americans (my Cherokee ancestors included) used these smudgings for various things by using certain herbs and plants for certain functions, such as protection and purification. First, the smudging of the house was done, I was smudged next, holding my arms out, smudged front and then back, I did the same for Panna, and then she smudged the forest. Finally, the smudging vessel was laid down to let the sage burn itself out, and it was done. Very soon, the storm moved on, and we saw that Christelie had been at the house and was moving downed branches off the driveway so she could get through to pick up Sophie from school. Once the rain stopped, we loaded up the car before it would rain again in case we got the call that the loan papers were finalized. While we loaded up, Panna handed me the last length of a branch that was torn off a tree in the storm as an offering of protection during the drive home, which I gladly accepted and thought to see if it would root in a container of water when I got home (before you lecture me, I don't know a thing about growing trees).

We later received a call from Christelie saying that in the years since they were building the log house, moved in, and lived there, that she had never seen such a violent storm in the area. A branch or a tree nearly hit the log house on its way down, and electricity was taken out at the log house.

We decided that the salesman might have run into another snag, so we called him around 3 45 and learned that the papers were now FINALIZED. Finally, we could sign the papers and pick up the car!

I petted the cats in farewell, and I waved at the forest and the creatures as I left the forest with Panna at 4 30. We saw blue skies coming out to the south and west. We saw a large downed tree by a low-lying area in the neighborhood and hoped that the storm wouldn't conspire to prevent us from reaching the dealership, which we found not to be the case with a big relief.

We arrived at the dealership; I checked the Toyota car one last time for anything I missed (a brand-new bottle of windex, no less!) and started the motor one last time to hear it.

And then we sat down to this entangling business that took nearly THREE HOURS to complete. I was getting flustered by the stack of papers as thick as a rough draft of a dissertation, even though it meant going home in a much newer, more reliable vehicle. I had to bite my tongue, as both the salesman and Panna worked their magic with me to make this possible. I thanked them profusely for making this happen, for all I had put them through. I definitely know what it's like to use public transportation in Texas cities; Austin for a year and a half through its then-most consistently cold winter on record and walking over a half-mile in the painful cold from the closest point of the bus route to the computer school (for some reason, I suffer pain right behind my ears either within the skull bone or inside the skull itself when it's very cold) and then for the first week of work at my store in Houston while my car was being fixed. If you are car-less, you should simply write Texas and similar states entirely off the list and go to far-more-sensible places like Washington, DC or New York City, where public transportation was built into the cities very early in their mechanized history of transportation. Here in car-culture states, being without a vehicle is an experience that makes you feel powerless and majorly inconvenienced.

I finally got in the new car and was being shown the features of the car.