I’m a little nervous. One of my wife’s friends from an online writing club is coming out to visit the Black Hills on Friday. I haven’t met this one yet, but based on the maniacal giggling coming from my wife while she ‘plays with her nerds’ (her words) while typing madly on her computer, it’s bound to be an interesting weekend.

She’s flying out of New Orleans, connecting in Denver, and will land at Rapid City Regional Airport around 11 a.m. It sounds like her round-trip ticket on United Airlines, with travel insurance and taxes, rung up at about $400. Considering she booked the whole thing only four days in advance, that seems pretty good to me.

In fact, she tells my wife that my recent post about Frontier Airlines’ expansion of service in Rapid City helped convince her to book the trip (it turns out that United had the better deal this time). I’m not sure I believe her, though. I have a feeling she’s trying to flatter me before she shows up and whisks my wife away to draft evil plots and new characters for their fiction club.

It sounds like they’re already plotting. Something about a character using a picture of Mount Rushmore to request a mountain sculpture of his own (“Uh, is this thing to scale?”). Honestly, who hasn’t wanted a megalithic sculpture of themselves?