10.22.02 - 3:02 p.m.

I am a gimp. I gashed my palm this morning while trying to separate two frozen Santa Fe gardenburgers and now every time I type - nay, every time I MOVE my left hand - it unclots and I become an oozing, gangrenous grump.

Damn siamese twin gardenburgers. Here's a tip: make your lunch the night before. Otherwise you will be slicing avocados for guacamole with a bloody knife the next morning. Since I am forced to hunt and peck with my right hand, here is what's been happening in a nutshell:

Dan and I went on the Great Lighthouse Scavenger Hunt (ok, the New Jersey Lighthouse Challenge). You can just read his account of our adventures, since he's basing his recollections on the notes I took in our road trip journal anyway. Although I will clarify/add to two points:

The bunker where they filmed A Better Place was freaky. It had that eerie Watcher in the Woods quality to it, despite the hordes of spandex-clad cyclists milling about taking pictures. And the tunnel into blackness? That was even scarier, since we were alone at the entrance and there was just this pit of murk disappearing into the shadows. Even the windows further along the tunnel didn't help; they just made me think that something could pop out at any time.

I wasn't too freaked by any of this when I was there, but somehow when I woke up from whatever dream I was having in the EconoLodge bed, it magnified all its creepiness. Somehow my thoughts of the bunker became fused with my memories of House of Leaves (since Kinetix just wrote about it and we had been listening to the version of "Hey Pretty" where Mark Z. Danielewski reads passages over the music) until I was one big ball of fear. I wasn't too afraid while I was reading that book, but every now and again it returns to haunt me. It's sly that way.

The other reason I didn't sleep well that night was the EconoLodge bed itself. Dan has already documented the relative skeeziness of the room, but the bed only added to my germ phobia. I won't sit on any hotel bedspread if I am not fully clothed, and I won't let any blanket come remotely NEAR my face. So imagine my shock when I found that the bottom sheet stopped a good six inches before the bottom of the bed, leaving a swath of germy, fuzzy mattress pad exposed. It was no good to stay at the top of the bed since the top sheet stopped more than a foot away from the headboard. I spent the entire night scrunched in a ball somewhere in the middle in a futile attempt to stay warm.

Plus, I walked around either on my tiptoes or in socks the entire time to avoid any germs that could be picked up from the carpet. I am my mother's daughter.