Yoknapatawpha

Today was a wonderful day. An absolutely wonderful day.

 Faulkner and his wife, buried in Oxford, MS.

 This house is a private residence, but it's the house that Faulkner based the Compson house on (featured in The Sound and the Fury). There should be a fence around it, but they've taken it down.

 Rowan Oak! Faulkner's estate!

 This photo was hanging up inside the house and I loved it, because, as the caption reads, Faulkner is almost never seen happy.

 His typewriter. I wish I could've touched it.

On the walls of his office he has the outline written for one of his novels. I don't know if it's possible to explain how incredible it is to see something like that. He wrote that there. My favorite writer. It's his creative process right there on the wall. In his handwriting. Right there.

 Faulkner used to be the postmaster in Oxford, but was fired because he wasn't very good at it. This quote says "I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every s.o.b. who's got two cents to buy a stamp." Thought it was funny. Above that is a sheet of the stamp issued with his picture on it in 1987.

 Here's the statue.

 Me sitting next to him! (It was cooler today.) This is awkward because I had to take the picture myself and because his arm holding his pipe makes it hard to get closer.

 Snow leopard at the Memphis Zoo! The Memphis Zoo, by the way, is really quite awesome. They have very few old sections left that need to be updated. Cat Country is particularly awesome. And, a little strangely, the zoo is "themed" to be ancient Egypt. The entrance looks like an Egyptian temple.

 Grizzly bear eating grass and playing with his feet in a pool.

Wolf on the right is about ready to pounce on wolf at the left.

The zoo also had a Pacific Northwest section that had a Chief Seattle memorial garden, which I thought was really neat.

I had things to say earlier today, but now I'm exhausted.

I have to figure out what I want to do in Memphis tomorrow, and what my trip down the Mississippi is going to look like.

I'm staying in a hotel that gives me a kitchenette in my room but it doesn't have cable. I can't decide if it's a good trade off. But I did go to the grocery store and get food so I could make breakfast, and dinner. I'm only staying here one night, though, so I could only buy things I could use right away. I bought a carton of 6 eggs and for dinner I had eggs with salsa and toast. In the morning I'll have a great big omelette. The grocery store had a salad bar so I got the amount of veggies I would need for one omelette. It was perfect! I got a small load of bread from the bakery so hopefully it'll get eaten before it goes bad. It was nice to make food, even if it was just eggs.

Okay, bed time. While I was staying in Florida, I was staying up until 2 or 3 and sleeping until 11. I get on the road and right away my sleeping schedule switched to up at 8 (at the latest, without an alarm) and in bed by 10 or 11. 12 at latest if I have things to do before bed. How strange.