I just realized that I haven’t posted anything here since the last Cave-In, at least not on the main page. Where did this month go? Straight to hell, if there’s any justice. Although one could say that this month WAS hell, and that’s a valid argument, too. It’s just a good thing that Weldon taught us all coping strategies last month, because boy, do we need them. 

Fortunately, this was a really fun episode that provided a welcome respite. The premise sounds vaguely familiar to us Muppet Pundit veterans. Coincidence? I think not. (I don’t KNOW, but I THINK not.)

I think it was back in Episode 5 that Weldon first mentioned liking Little House on the Prairie, and ever since then I’ve been meaning to bring it up with him. That wasn’t how I’d intended to do it, but it worked out okay. “This is a lot to hear about Little House on the Prairie,” said Weldon, but there’s actually way more where that came from. I should say that while it is true that most of the Ingalls family is buried in De Smet, Laura Ingalls Wilder herself is not buried there because she and her husband moved away to … I wanna say Missouri or someplace. 

The Little House books are considered fictionalized versions of true events rather than strict autobiography, but there is one particular event that was dramatized in the books that really happened. When Charles Ingalls (Laura’s father, portrayed on television by Michael Landon) took out his homestead near De Smet, he planted four cottonwood trees, one for each of his four daughters. Well, the homestead is still there; it’s been turned into a tourist attraction. The cottonwood trees are still there too, or at least they were twenty-some years ago when I was there. There’s a lot that they’ve preserved about Laura’s life, but that as much as anything brought home to me the fact that these were real people who actually existed in the world. 

Anyway, I could go on all night about Laura Ingalls Wilder and De Smet, but I don’t know how interesting that will be. In other news, I haven’t figured out my life yet, but I have figured out my options, so that’s something, I guess. 

Anyway, I just want to observe that it was exactly one year ago today that I first met Steve at OCon in Council Bluffs. I’ve been thinking about that a lot today and reliving it. It all seems very surreal, not only the part about meeting Steve but just crowding hundreds of people together in the same room and shaking hands and stuff. I mean, did people really do that? 

It’s just really fortunate that the timing worked out the way it did. I’m luckier than I have any right to be in that regard. And if I hadn’t been living in Sioux Falls at the time, attending OCon would have been out of the question. So all the decisions I made that kept me here are good decisions, even if they seemed questionable at the time. Therefore, maybe figuring my life out is overrated. Maybe I should take a page out of the Fraggles’ book and just go with the flow.