Tell me I’m not the only one to have misheard that lyric when I was a kid.  I’m sure it’s a common thing, common enough to make my friend and I giggle during a football game yesterday.

Oh we were so bad last night.  Our team was doing quite well, which is the norm and not the exception, but our cheerleading team was something else.  They were far more interested in gossiping with each other than keeping the crowd excited.  It got to the point where I would start a cheer by my own self with my friend joining in.  We got a few dirty looks from the cheerleading coach, but it didn’t compel her to get the girls cheering.

The other team had, in addition to their cheer squad, a dance team.  And all our boys could do throughout halftime was stare with undisguised longing at those girls as they romped across the field.

Ahhh, teenage hormones.  Gotta love it.

It was just after halftime that the moon started to rise, and it really was that angry, orange color.  It was pretty creepy, to tell the truth.  The color faded as it rose in the sky, so by the time we left the game, it was almost its normal white. I’ve noticed that orange-red moons seem to be rather common here in Rhode Island.  I tried running one down a year or so ago, but failed in photographing it because I didn’t have my big camera on me.  A shock, I know.  This I took with the big camera and my 55-200mm zoom lens, and even then, I had to take something like fifteen shots before I was satisfied with this one.

Thank goodness for digital.  I love being able to see whether I’ve gotten the shot or not, especially with night shots.  They’re so easy to mess up.  My first try at that shot was horrible — too bright, too noisy, and way too blurry.  I doubled the shutter speed, stood as still as I could, and braced the long lens as best as I could, and voila!  A pretty shot.

Seeing as technology has been failing me as of late (what with popping streetlights and randomly broken point-and-shoot cameras and now my computer that likes to take forever to start up a new program), it was quite nice to have it work for me gloriously well this morning.  I got to sleep in, thanks to my lovely husband who got up with the girls this morning and allowed me to sink back into my dreamworld, so it was late by the time I made it out to the living room.  I checked my email, Facebook, Twitter — and there on my Twitter was a tweet from a friend who said he was on his way to Boston for the weekend.  I immediately sent him a direct message, assuming it would go straight to his phone as a text since he had tweeted by text, and he sent back his cell phone number so we could keep in more direct contact.  All this turned into a random jaunt up to the big city, where we were foiled by the prospect of delicious mac n’ cheese.  How does a restaurant justify being closed on a Saturday afternoon??

Oh, well.  The weather was lovely, the company engaging and entertaining, and the food, when we finally found a place to eat, quite scrumptious.  It was my first time meeting my friend’s wife, though I’ve known him since we were both fifteen and sophomores in high school.  We went to the same college and graduated with the same degree, but after college he went on to law school in New York while I married Kurt.   I was supposed to go to their wedding last summer, but my cousin was married that same weekend.  And hindsight being 20/20, it was probably a good thing I didn’t try to go to both weddings, as I gave birth to Mary Ellen just a week later.  Everyone was shocked I went to Aubrey’s wedding at all, being so huge and all.  Folks, I was just pregnant.  Not sick.  It wasn’t that big a deal to go to her wedding, and I’m so glad I did.

I put my Stamp of Approval on my friend’s wife tonight.  How could I not?  She’s going for her Master’s in Library Science, and anyone with an MLS is way cool in my book.  Maybe one day I’ll hie myself back to school and procure an MLS for my own self.  One day…

What, aren’t you having a bonfire tonight??  My good friend who lives down the street spent several years in England, her husband being stationed there, so she is utterly Anglicized.  Often as not, she’ll shout, “OI!” to her sons instead of the more American “HEY!”  I told her we need to have a bonfire tonight, in honor of Guy Fawkes Night, but alas, she’s in nursing school and had to go to class tonight.

*sigh*

Everyone ruins my fun.

Who is Guy Fawkes??  He was one of the infamous conspirators who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament on this night in 1605.  The thought was that the Catholic conspirators would kill most of the Protestant members of Parliament, as well as King James I, himself a Protestant.  But the plot was discovered and the plotters executed.

Excellent reason for a bonfire, no?  We used to have neighborhood fires before all my friends moved away, so any reason to light up a chiminea is a good one — though we’re technically not allowed to have them here in housing.  ME was only a few weeks old when she attended her first neighborhood fire, where the children raced around in the dark till they collapsed like puppies in exhaustion, and the adults drank homemade hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.  Yum.

But now everyone is gone, except my Anglophile friend, but she’s so busy with school that I never see her.

I have a new friend now!  Our dear Poolagirl saw how enthralled I was with her Nigel, and she graciously offered that I take him home with me.  How could I refuse?

Getting an alien through security was quite fun.  I was worried he would cause problems, as his body is constructed from a metal frame, but the TSA agents thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.  All the agents crowded around once he emerged from the X-ray machine and asked about him.  Nigel rode in my backpack all the way to the gate, with his head sticking out so he could see.  Apparently I nearly whacked his head on the bulkhead as I boarded the plane, causing the flight attendants to gasp in horror.  They thought he was a real baby!

I had spoken with a few of my fellow travelers during my layover in Chicago, and they were so captivated by my handsome friend that they wanted to know his name and where he was from.  And once I arrived in Rhode Island, they asked how he had enjoyed the flight, and whether he thought he’d like his new home.

They did get his name wrong, though.  They thought it was Nathan.  He doesn’t even look like a Nathan!  Nigel suits him perfectly.

Apparently the  first night I was home from San Diego, Grace had to get up in the middle of the night to visit the little girls’ room, and she saw Nigel in the light of the hall lamp resting on our little end table.  She said he freaked her out, and she wouldn’t go anywhere near him when they were first introduced.

I guess he would be freaky to encounter in the middle of the night.

She quickly got over her fear of him.

Now they’re the best of friends!

But then Shippie, Poolie’s niece, and the one who had given Nigel to Poolie to begin with, noticed that he was now residing in Rhode Island.  This morning I got an email from Shippie, asking me to prove that Nigel is hale and healthy, and that he’s having a good time here with me and my girls.  She wanted a photo of him with a current newspaper as proof.

Here he’s reading yesterday’s paper, as our newspaper is delivered in the afternoon.  There are some weighty things in the news here in the tiniest state in the Union.  Yes, folks, the world’s oldest profession is legal here, if it takes place indoors.  At least it was until Tuesday.  Apparently our Governor has signed a law that makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by prison terms of up to six months for a first-time offense, to up to a year for repeat offenders.

Fortunately I don’t think it will affect Nigel in any way.  He doesn’t really seem to be interested in that sort of thing, mainly because there isn’t a female of his species on the planet.

Poor guy.

I swear, I have a curse.  If it’s electronic in nature, it’s going to go south on me.

I first noticed it in college.  Every time I walked across campus at night, at least one streetlight would pop as I walked underneath it.  It got to that I didn’t even startle when it happened, though my friends who walked with me would jump.  It still happens, though with less frequency now that I’m not out and about at night.  But as Beanie and I left Poolie’s house after we’d had dinner, the light under which we’d parked blew out.

That’s probably why the transformer popped the night of the really bad ice storm back in Washington state.  It was December 2006, and we’d gotten about four inches of snow and a thick layer of ice.  The power went out at 9pm the night before, so I went to bed.  Not much to do when the power’s out.  I read for a bit by flashlight and slept till almost 9am the next morning.  That’s when the power came back on, and I congratulated myself on sleeping through the whole thing.  Not fifteen minutes later, I heard a muffled pop — and the power went out again.  I looked around my neighborhood, and it appeared as though I was the only person in the neighborhood without power.  Come to find out, the transformer at the end of the driveway had popped, cutting power to my house, my next-door neighbor’s house, and the two houses across the street.  Even though power workers were in my neighborhood that day, fixing downed lines, it took them a couple more days before they came out to make the simple fifteen-minute fix to my transformer.  I ended up staying with a neighbor, as it was only 40º in my house by then.  My heat and my stove at the time were all run on electricity, so I couldn’t even cook food for myself and Grace.  It was pretty bad.

Did I mention Kurt had just left on deployment?  He kept calling the power company from Mexico to try to get them to come out more quickly.  I’m not sure it worked.  Thank goodness for my kind neighbors.

Every computer I have had has gone back in one way, shape, or form.  The first desktop Kurt and I had, it ended up with a corrupted version of IE, and there is no way to remove IE and reinstall if it becomes corrupted.  So we bought another desktop, and made the permanent switch to Firefox.  After a few years, the new desktop too went south.  It won’t even boot!  It sits in my closet, awaiting the day when I feel like reformatting the damn thing.

Damn Windows.

Then you have my HP laptop, whose hard drive died after only 15 months.

And my bad luck isn’t restricted to computers.  Remember my oven?  How it wouldn’t heat one day and had to have its glow plug replaced?

My pink Casio point-and-shoot developed an oddity where it wouldn’t stay on, and it would display something akin to the Blue Screen of Death that we Windows users are quite familiar with.  I would have to pop out the battery for a few moments to get it to work again, but it would do the same thing after only a few minutes.  (Kurt used the Casio while I was in San Diego and reported no issues, which just confirms to me that it’s me that’s the problem.)

My brand-new iPod?  It can’t seem to find my location, instead insisting that I live on a cul-de-sac in El Paso, Texas, which is a good two thousand miles away from my actual location in Rhode Island.  After searching through the help forums and turning off my iPod and resetting all my settings back to factory defaults, I contacted Apple, who had me restore my brand-spankin’ new iPod.  Gah.  And it’s still telling me I live in El Paso.

And tonight?  I turned on my little Nikon point-and-shoot, the one I bought to replace the pink Casio back in July, only to get a lens error.  It would extend and retract the lens, all the while beeping in distress, before displaying “LENS ERROR” on the screen.  *sigh*  The help forums tells me to recharge the battery, and if that doesn’t work, leave the battery out of the camera overnight.  If that doesn’t work, I have to send it in.

You know, I would like my things to just work for a reasonable amount of time and not crap out at me every time I turn around.  Is that really too much to ask?

I may be committing blasphemy by  admitting this, but I’m not a huge fan of Halloween.  I never really have been, to be honest.  Sure, it was nice to get a butt-ton of candy one night out of the year, but my parents sort of took all the fun out of it by going through our loot before we could have any of it, and then rationing whatever was left.  I lost interest so quickly that I usually ended up forgetting I even had Halloween candy less than a week later, and it would sit on the top shelf of our pantry until my mom found it the next summer during one of her rare purges of our stockpiled food.

My mom was a working mom to boot, and a woman who didn’t exactly expect to have three kids, two half-grown, by the time she was 38, considering that just five years before, she was a single woman focused on her career with the US Navy.  It was quite an adjustment for all of us, but especially for her.  She did the best she could, and she did a good job — but Mrs Cleaver she was not.  She did make all of my Halloween costumes, though they weren’t very elaborate.  In first grade, she bought a costume kit, as it were, from the fabric store, which ultimately ended in my wearing what amounted to a pillowcase decorated with glow-in-the-dark skeletons, with my face painted to match.  The face painting was pretty darn cool, I have to admit.

The next costume I remember was the one I wore in fifth grade, in which my mom pinned a tail made from braided red raffia to red sweatpants (just about the only time I was allowed to wear them out of the house), and I wore a red turtleneck to match.  She painted my face red too, and I wore devil’s horns and carried a pitchfork.  We were living in northern Illinois by that time, and I was amazed I wasn’t cold, though I didn’t have gloves.  That’s about all I remember about that year, my strangely warm hands.  It was probably snowing.  It usually did on Halloween.

My final costume in my memory was made for my seventh grade year, though I am not sure I was allowed to go trick-or-treating.  I continued to walk around and take my brother for years after I grew too old to get candy, but I think seventh grade was probably my last year for candy-gathering.  I probably didn’t even bother to go trick-or-treating in eighth grade because we were in the process of moving to Nebraska, and life was in a bad state of upheaval at that time.  Not fun.  Anyhow, that year my mom sewed strips of white fabric to a white sweatshirt and sweatpants to make a mummy.  I remember wearing it to the Halloween party our school had at a local farm, where we had a bonfire and a hayride that was supposed to be haunted.  One of the vampires or ghosts following our tractor didn’t realize the second tractor was following us so closely, and when I pointed it out to him, that the other tractor was on our heels, he exclaimed, “Shit!” and ran off to try to get into position.  My seventh-grade brain found that hilariously funny, and I didn’t stop laughing for a good thirty minutes.

That was also the year I was asked to dance by a boy for the first time.  When I lived in Illinois, I was one of the outcasts because I was so different.  I talked differently (still had my southern accent at the time), I looked different (I was tall for my age, though I grew out of that, and I developed quite early), I had a different name (I was the only person of Jewish ancestry in a school full of white protestants), and I was extremely socially inept.  I still am, though I do try my best.  When all the girls, all fifteen of them in my entire grade, had paired up with boys, I was still left on the sidelines.  Finally at this bonfire during my seventh grade year, this one boy named Adam, a so-called nerd by general consensus, asked me to dance.  And I said yes, mainly because I had had a crush on him for several months, as he was an extremely nice boy, but also because holy crap, someone wanted to dance with me??

And then that was the end of it.  Both of us were too shy for anything to develop from that, and we knew the social backlash would be huge.  Besides, he was a grade ahead of me, and I was moving in a year, though I didn’t know it at at the time.  The memory of that evening, dancing with him by the light of a bonfire, is a fond one.

At any rate, we still do Halloween in this house, though neither Kurt nor I are wont to dress up in costume.  ME went as a ladybug this year, in a costume given to me by a friend.  It’s not something I would have chosen, but dang, was it cute!  She only lasted about a block, though.  I don’t know what was wrong with her; she was really zoned out all night long.  Grace was the most amazing robot I have ever seen.  Kurt had made this pretty elaborate costume using nothing but a big box and some flashing lights while I was in San Diego with the javelina hunters, and seeing it for my own self was pretty amazing.  The bonus to it was she was extremely visible all night long.  She had four flashing red lights on the front of her costume, along with six glow sticks, and somehow Kurt had wrangled my Woot-off strobe lights onto the back of her costume — and those things are damn bright.   Her arms were made from dryer ducting, and she wore silver sparkly leggings with silver sparkly Crocs-like shoes to complete the costume.  It was awesome!!

I love it!! (Click HERE for a look at the costume in better light.)  And like the terrible parents my parents were before me, we’ve gone through Grace’s candy, stolen those containing peanuts and consumed them, and put her candy away so that none of us will even remember she has any.

Not till Easter, at the very earliest.

Hallelujah, praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!  I have found that which I was looking for!!  Of course, it took me placing an order over at Amazon.com before I found it, but that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Did I mention I have a new iPod Touch?  Well, I do.  My husband bought it for me for our eight-year anniversary back on the 12th.  I love love love this thing.  I could whip it out and check my email while I was staying at Beanie’s without starting up my entire computer (yes, I ultimately took the laptop, mainly for ease of photo uploading while I was in San Diego — not that I actually had time to do that), and I even snuck onto a hotel’s WiFi connection while I was at dinner with my best friend from high school so I could show her what my brother looks like now.  The last time she saw him, he was still in elementary school.  Now he’s almost 21, so there was a bit of a change.

He doesn’t even look 21, which is the problem.  The last photo I have of him online is from two years ago, so he was only 18.  Yet he looks at least 25 and could easily pass for my older brother, since I only look about 20 years old myself.

I bet he never ever ever gets carded.

Anyhoo, I was searching high and low for my Dave Matthews Band CD, my copy of Under the Table and Dreaming, as that is one of my all-time favorite albums.  I cannot tell you which song is my favorite because I love them all.  Technically my absolute favorite is “Satellite,” but there isn’t one bad song on that album, not even “Ants Marching,” which radio stations (XM included) have played into the ground.

It’s played at least once every couple of hours on XM.  I kid you not.  And this is a song that came out in 1994, or thereabouts, so it’s not even worthy of overplaying at this point in time.

Alas, I could not locate that album before I left for San Diego, so it was up to Metallica and Apocalyptica and the Dixie Chicks and the Black Eyed Peas and Los Lonely  Boys and Mika and the Dresden Dolls and the Beatles and the Barenaked Ladies to keep me entertained.  Yes, I have a very eclectic taste in music.  That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to Kurt.  Who else, besides me, would have Paula Abdul and Metallica in the same CD case?

He did.

Anyhow, that CD is, as I have mentioned, one of my ultimate favorites, and one I want to have a hard copy of.  So Kurt finally told me I should buy a new copy.  I checked the Best Buy near my house (yes, yes, I know, it’s the Evil Blue Empire, but it’s literally around the corner from my house) — no dice, though I did manage to pick up a 2009 remastered digital copy of The Beatles’ White Album for just $13.  SCORE!  I looked at Target earlier this week.  I even had plans to make my way down to the record store in Newport.  Finally I gave up and put in an order to Amazon, along with a copy of an album by the band The Hours.

But then today I remembered I wanted more Los Lonely Boys on my iPod, and I recalled there was a bunch of loose CDs under our tv.  So I dove under there, only to find not only my Los Lonely Boys CD but also Under the Table and Dreaming.  WOO HOO!!  Fortunately my order hadn’t yet shipped from Amazon, and I was able to cancel it.  That means I still do not own The Hours.

But I will.  Oh I am sure I will.

I’ve had my iPod on shuffle pretty much all day today, with my little mini speaker plugged in so I can hear it.  A few moments ago, Bon Jovi’s “Ride Cowboy Ride” just came on as Dave Matthews Band was ending, and my ears perked up.  See, the beginning of “Ride Cowboy Ride” includes the sound of a phonograph needle hitting the record, along with the pregnant pause just before the song begins.  I hadn’t realized how much I missed that sound until that song came on — and it came through in such clarity on my digital iPod.

My real mom had a slew of records when I was growing up, so listening to records wasn’t an unusual thing for us.  I even have some of my own, though during my foraging for CDs to rip to my iPod, I found my LP of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet broken in half.  I wanted to weep.  It must have happened during one of the moves.  I’m sure one of the packers just shoved it into a box instead of packing it gently.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I don’t have a record player anyhow, though I keep wanting to bring one home from the thrift store.  Maybe one day I’ll have one.  There’s just something about listening to music on vinyl.  It’s not quite as portable as an iPod, but it sure has more of an aesthetic quality about it.

I guess I really am an old fuddy-duddy.

Oh, it’s so hard to be home after such a lovely week away!  And it doesn’t help that the weather was absolutely gorgeous over in San Diego.  Sun, sun, and more sun, followed by warm temperatures (almost too warm!) and compelling blue skies, with some sea air thrown in for good measure.  And today it was cold and windy and blustery, with loads of rain, and now all the gorgeous fall leaves have fallen to the ground.  I completely missed the height of the fall colors by being in San Diego for six days.  Go figure.

And it was just one of those days.  You know the ones, where nothing ever goes right.  Grace, for whatever reason, is deciding to be as contrary as she could possibly be.  Maybe I should have named her Mary — you know, “Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”

Then I look back at my photos from the Javelina Hunt (and I am still uploading the damn things; I took at least 100 each day I was there, so I had to pick and choose which to upload.  Even still I’m only up to Saturday afternoon.  I still have to post the lovely photos from Beanie’s and my trip down to La Jolla to see the seals), and I remember what a great time I had.  And I see a lovely photo like this:

and I remember what a lovely time we all had.  This was at Major’s Diner during the road rally.  I guess Heinous decided it was time to cause a ruckus, so he tried sticking his cocktail sword into poor Peggy’s mouth while Terri collapsed into giggles.  We’d gone in there to get a quick bite to eat, but it took a while for the waitress to come over to take our order after we’d told her what drinks we’d like.  Then it took us another hour after placing our order to get our food!  I’d gotten a guacamole burger, and it was overcooked, well into the well-done category when I had asked for medium, and the guacamole was just meh.  Which it shouldn’t be, not in the land of the avocado.  That’s why we ultimately gave up on the road rally and instead made our way through the Cleveland National Forest.

I love Peggy’s shirt as well.  It reads, “Horses leave hoofprints on our hearts.”  Is that her or what??

But at least I have been reading some excellent books to keep my mind off of everything.  Just before I left on the Hunt, I finished Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, part of KitchenLogic’s monthly bookclub.  If you are not a member, go sign up!  It doesn’t cost anything, and none of us are Judgey McJudgeyPants.  If you like that month’s book, great!  If you don’t, that’s fine too!  The only requirement is that you are to share a recipe you enjoy, and even that seems to be rather optional.  Anyhow, that’s how I got to read Peace Like a River, and it’s really a fantastic book.  It was one where I kept thinking about the book, even when I was doing something else.  I love it when that happens!

Then on the plane I started reading The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga.  All the reviews on the back cover and the first few pages made it sound like it was going to be a dirty novel — not that I really have anything against those sorts of things; I just normally don’t go for such things.  The novel follows a girl of 29 who decided to head to Italy after the flood of the Arno in 1966 to help try to save the nation’s fragile treasures, as she is a book conservator.  And of course, she finds herself while in Italy, through many twists and turns and false starts.  Yet it was a gripping tale, though I didn’t really know where it was going for the first few chapters.  I just stuck with it because I really enjoyed the writing, and I started rooting for Margot and her journey through life.  Plus I used to work in the Manuscripts & Rare Books Department, and later in Preservation & Conservation, when I was in college, so I am rather familiar with old and fragile books.  I’ve done a wee bit of conservation in my life, though nothing to the extent that Margot performed on her found copy of The Sixteen Pleasures, however.

Now I’m onto Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, a book that takes place during England’s War of the Roses, an extremely tumultuous time in that nation’s history.  And now with a sinking heart I realize that Elizabeth Woodville’s two sons from her first marriage are the two princes in the Tower, the ones they never found, and whose fate has never been revealed to this day.  Yeesh.  I’m only eighty pages into it, so Elizabeth has just married King Edward, of the House of York, though her family has been Lancasterians for years, and she’s managed to marry off all her relatives to people in high places to secure her place as Queen.  It’s quite enjoyable, though, and I look forward to going to bed so I can read some more!  I know Terri loved it, and what Terri loves, I usually do as well.

Hopefully tomorrow’s weather will be better, though considering how much housework I’ve accomplished, I’ve more than earned a day off to lay on the couch and read — as much as a fussy one-year-old will allow me, of course.  Everything I do, I do with ME’s indulgence.  Gotta love being a mother!

So now I am back in the land of fall foliage and grey skies.  The tree in my front yard went from some red leaves against mostly green to being covered in orange-yellow leaves.  I think I missed the height of the fall beauty during the six days I was in San Diego.  But oh, was it worth it!

I have posted some of my photos from the scavenger hunt in my earlier post, but for ease of judging by our own SJAT, I shall repost all my photos here in this entry.  If you’d like to see any of them larger, click on the photo to be taken to Flickr.

Ready??

GO!

Surprised wild animal:

Red plant:

Pirate flag:

Something fluffy:

(Doesn’t Meg look lovely in her boa??)

Unusually colored food:

Person waving:

Three fruit together:

Something on fire:

Clown trousers:

A bagel:

Someone dancing:

Sealions playing:

A figure of authority:

Tacky statue (I actually have two submissions over at Flickr):

Garish colors:

A Princess!

Someone asleep:

Aircraft in flight:

Wool:

And last but certainly not least, a (pirate) javelina!

I’m sooooo far behind on my photos.  I have taken over 100 photos every day that I have been here, and I just can’t keep up.  Granted, I don’t post all 100 photos because that would be boring.  But I still have to go through them all, and write descriptions and tags, and upload them.  It’s a lot of work.  So I’m only up to Friday afternoon’s photos.  Maybe if I have time I’ll be able to post the photos from Poolie’s party on Friday night and start on Saturday’s photos from the road rally.

Man, that road rally.  How cool was that?!  All this gorgeous desert landscape, stuff that your average tourist to San Diego won’t ever get to see.  This is why I am so glad I got to stay with people who live in the city.  I have seen so much of San Diego, all sorts of lovely things, not just your normal touristy things.  It’s been fabulous.

I’m going to have to devote a whole entry to the road rally when I get back home to Newport.  Seeing those bright, sunny photos, and remembering how much fun we had, will really cheer me up when I get back to the grey, dismal weather we’ve been having back home.

Last night was so much fun.  The girls came over to Beanie’s, and we played the word association game where one person says a word, and the next person in line says the first thing that pops into her head.  As you can imagine, it got very silly, and very funny.  I almost peed myself laughing several times.  Then it was time to roast the puffies, which didn’t work quite as well as it did in Tombstone, mainly because we couldn’t walk down the main street with our flaming puffies and our sashes.  Maybe next year if we have it in a different location it’ll work better.  But we did it, even with our limitations, so the tradition has been maintained.

And the weather here has been simply amazing.  Today it was just Beanie and me, bumming around San Diego.  We started off by going to this place called El Indio for lunch, though we got a wee bit turned around, giving me an awesome tour of a good portion of the city.  I miss Mexican food so, so much.  We can’t get any back in Rhode Island, not since our favorite place shut down in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.  My mission while here was to eat my own weight in Mexican food, and I’m doing a pretty good job of it.  Fortunately, you can’t turn around in San Diego without hitting a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint, so it hasn’t been hard to carry out my mission.  Today’s menu included a chile relleno which was quite good, along with very delicious hot salsa.  NOM.

Then it was off to La Jolla.  We’d planned to roast the puffies down on the beach at night, but we were all so wiped out from the road rally and all the sun and fresh air that we had it at Beanie’s instead.  The water down at La Jolla almost looks like the photos I’ve seen of Hawaii!  You can definitely see the different depths because of the different colors in the water itself.  We walked down quite a ways, smelling the salt air and watching the folks who’d come to the beach to play, until we got down to the cove where the seals live.  Everyone was on this little walkway that sticks quite a ways into the water to allow you to get up close and personal with the seals without disturbing them, so we made our way down there to get some photos for the scavenger hunt.  But instead of watching the seals intently, I was the only one facing out to sea, watching the waves crash against the shore and each other.  A wave would come and crash against the walkway, which would force it back out to sea, where it would meet an incoming wave with great force.  It was AWESOME.  I couldn’t stop watching it and enjoying the salt spray.

My camera didn’t like how bright the ocean was, so instead I will share with you a video I took of the seals on the beach.  They’re so cute!

As if that weren’t sea air enough, we then made our way down to Belmont Park, right there on Mission Beach.  This time I didn’t get my feet wet in the ocean, though I had done that over at La Jolla.  So now I can finally say I have stuck my feet in both oceans!  I lived for four and a half years in Washington state, yet I never made it to the coast.  Sad.  Beanie and I shared an ice cream cone and talked about everything and anything as we enjoyed the sun and the air and all the folks hanging out at the beach.  I couldn’t ask for a better day.

Now I’m about to get ready to meet up with my best friend from high school!!  I cannot wait to see her. It’s been eleven years.  It’ll be so fun to catch up with her.

And the Javelina Hunt is in full swing!!

I arrived last night at about 8:30pm local time, after a long flight all the way from Newark, NJ.  Actually I started in Providence and took a puddle-jumper to Newark.  When I had gotten the option to select my seat on that flight, I thought I was being smart by choosing the seat on the left side, which was the only seat on that side in that row, it being such a tiny plane.  But the bulkhead sloped so sharply on the left side that there was no room for my leg.  I would have been perfectly comfortable if I could have removed my left leg from the knee down, but alas, I have a perfectly functioning leg, and that isn’t an option I have.

The flight from Newark, while super, super long, was quite uneventful — aside from passing Air Force One as we taxied down the runway.  No, I didn’t see President Obama, but I did see a mess of black-suited men underneath the plane, milling around rather aimlessly.

My seatmate for the long flight was a Scottish woman, fresh from Edinburgh and on vacation with her husband.  Her plans included a couple of days in San Diego, followed by a cruise down through Central America and the Panama Canal and up to Baltimore.  I have to admit to a bit of jealousy because WOW how cool of a vacation would that be??  I fell in love with her accent, of course.  She told me all about where she lives in Scotland, and how her kids all have homes on her “wee” farm there.  I kept hoping she would keep saying “wee” throughout the conversation, and she unknowingly obliged me.  I just couldn’t get enough of the way she spoke.  Of course, she told me I had an accent too.

Hmm.

Beanie met me at the airport, so excited to finally meet me after all these years.  And not long after we made it back to her apartment, her Mr D arrived too — and on his motorcycle to boot!  As if that weren’t exciting enough, then Rosie showed up to spend the evening with us.  It was a lot of laughing and talking and joking and giggling and story-telling, all while I tried to prop my eyes open as best as I could.  By the time, my body was screaming for sleep, having slept poorly the night before, and dealing with the three-hour time difference between Rhode Island and California.  Finally I curled up on my bed for the weekend and passed out.  I heard nothing once I fell asleep, not even the pump for the air mattress that Rosie employed to blow up her bed for the night.

This morning we lazed around a bit, each on a computer, and enjoyed fresh coffee and toasted bagels while we slowly came awake.  We needed to conserve energy for our fun-filled afternoon, in which we visited the auto museum, Trader Joe’s, and Old Town.  And of course, even more laughter and silliness and story-telling ensued — because what else will happen when you put six fun-loving women together?

We also made some headway on SJAT’s assignment for our photo scavenger hunt, so I will post the photos I have thus far:

First we have Three Fruit Together:

I do believe that qualifies, being a pineapple, a mango, and a papaya. I’m pretty sure that’s a papaya, anyhow.

Next up, Unusually Colored Food:

I suppose it’s not that unusual, but isn’t it so that there isn’t any truly blue food? I mean, blueberries are actually purple.

The next one was too easy once we hit Old Town. Garish Colors:

Can’t get much more garish than that!! They’re Guatemalan fabrics, which I love because my brother is Guatemalan too. He’s not quite so garishly colored, however. That photo was taken in a store in Old Town in which the six of us wandered around, shooting anything and everything that caught our eye — until a woman told us after we left the store that photos were not allowed. Well. How about telling us while we’re taking photos??

Our next photo is Aircraft in Flight:

I love taking photos of contrails, especially when the sunlight hits them just so.

And last but not least for today, we have Red Plant:

I have no idea what kind of flower this is, but it sure is pretty!!

Tomorrow we meet Big Sister for breakfast, and then Terri and Beanie and I will go to Seaport Village and Balboa Park while Poolie and Yankee Chick visit the hair stylist’s.  I am sure more fun is in store for us!

So tomorrow I am off to San Diego, to meet up with fellow bloggers and javelina hunters for several days of fun, laughter, and good times.  I have to say I have been ignoring this trip in my head for the last several weeks.  It’s not that I don’t want to go; it’s just that I hate to travel.  Once I get going, I will be fine.  But packing, thinking about whether I’ll make it onto the plane with my stuff, sitting on the plane for six hours….  All of these things make me nervous a bit.

But I so love to fly.  Taking off and landing doesn’t bother me in the least, and even turbulence doesn’t normally faze me.  I love to look out the window and see the scenery, thinking about what the folks far below me are doing and whether they even notice me so high up in the sky.  I have gotten some really interesting photos from that vantage point.

That was taken on my first trip out to San Jose during the first annual CakesCon.  Like father, like daughter — my father flew somewhere not long after I took this trip, and he took a very similar photo.  I love these crop circles, formed by the circular irrigation systems.  And the little dusting of snow really brought out the contours of the fields.

I’m sure I’ll see some interesting scenery on my trip across the country.  I start out in Providence (praise cheeses, since that airport is close to my home and is so easy to fly in and out of), hop a puddle jumper to Newark, and then begin the long, long trek to San Diego.  That’s going to be a long, long time in the air — but I have a couple of books and my iPod to entertain me.  Hopefully I’ll also be tired enough to snooze a bit.

My aim during the flight is also to overdose on peanuts.  Since we can’t have them in the house, I tend to overdo it when I do get hold of them.  Seriously, I love peanuts — and it’s such a travesty to have a peanut-allergic kid.  Sure, I’ll do whatever it takes to prevent her from getting hold of them so she doesn’t suffer a reaction, but it still makes me sad.

Mmmm peanuts….

So now I am fully packed into one small duffel bag!  The hardest part was trying to decide what makeup to take with me. Folks, I have tons of it.  I have almost every color eyeshadow you could possibly want, and it’s so hard for me to choose ahead of time what I want to wear because I usually base it on my mood.  I don’t much care if I match my outfit, though I do try not to clash too horribly.  But there are days that I feel bright and days that I feel neutral. How to plan for that in the future??  I packed some of both, but I know I’ll want something I don’t have while I am there.

Hopefully I’ve brought enough.  I’m saving the food for the airport since I’ll be in Newark by the time I get hungry.  I figure that’s a large enough airport to give me lots of options.  I will have to remember to eat breakfast, though, so I don’t starve before I get there.

Also I am going to San Diego, so if I have forgotten something I could probably just buy it there.  Mainly the things I have to remember for sure are my contacts and my glasses.  Everything else is pretty much replaceable.

And if it weren’t exciting enough to meet all these fabulous ladies, I’ll also have the opportunity to meet up with my best friend from high school.  Sandy and I were inseparable back in the day, sharing nearly everything, including some of our deepest and darkest secrets.  She was going through an incredibly stressful time in her life back then, and somehow I managed to distract her from that enough that she could focus on being a teen.  Unfortunately she moved away after 10th grade, after one short year together — and she moved all the way to Coronado, California.  She stayed there until she decided to come back to the East Coast during my freshman year in college.  Over spring break she stayed at her mom’s long enough for me to catch up with her, and we spent a lovely night together, talking all night and catching up on everything — just like we’d done in high school.  Once more we lost track of each other, up until I thought to look for her on Facebook.  And lo and behold, there she was, about to marry her high school sweetheart, and more than thrilled to hear from me once again.  When I posted last month that I was on my way to San Diego, she insisted that I save some time for her — so on Sunday evening we’ll be having dinner together, and she may even join us for the road rally.  I can’t wait!

I also cannot wait to meet all these lovely ladies, like Rosie and Poolie and Terri and Beanie, whom I’ve read for years and years, as well as the other women who will be joining us.  I won’t be taking my laptop, so any posting I might do will happen on Beanie’s computer.  If we have time for that, of course!

Wish  me luck on these flights!!!