I left Virginia three weeks ago and lived out of a suitcase small enough to carry on the airplane. Now I am back in Alexandria, and I got to sleep in a bed (when I am at my parents' house, I tend to sleep on the couch, cause I no longer have a bedroom, and the guest room is always occupied and I am allergic to it anyway; I could have slept in Connor's room since he wasn't home, but the AC was broken and I could get a better breaze in the living room) all to myself. And now I am clothes that weren't in the suitcase! Yay! It makes me absurdly happy. _

I have this new shirt with a large keyhole in the back (on purpose, not a randomly made hole due to having a cheap shirt--it is Old Navy, so that would be a distinct possibility). I wore it a couple times in California, and I never managed to get sunburnt. Either the shirt seriously shifted today, or Jamie was just much better at putting sunscreen on my back than Anne. _

I downloaded the new version of Firefox. I'm not sure what I think of it so far. _

Our plane landed half an hour early last night, but that meant we still got in around midnight. Despite packing light (all my stuff was a carry on) we had tons of luggage, because we needed to bring back all this stuff for selling skirts (we spent hundreds of dollars with UPS to ship stuff back, because we knew Southwest wouldn't let us bring it on the plane). We had ten bags to check through, which with five people meant we only had to pay for the oversized bags of the tents and clothing racks (which was nice). Then we got all ten bags and our five carry on suitcases and laptops and whatnot into a stupid small sedan. A lot of stuff went onto the roof. And then we drove from Philly to Harrisburg and got home around 3. _

I'm sorry about double posts. Flickr seems to be flaky. I had some more pretty beach shots, and an amazing picture that Jamie took out the window while we were on the Golden Gate bridge to show, but I'm giving up for now. _

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More beach.
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More beach.
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We drove down the coast from Santa Rosa to Oakland (Con was pissed; he sat the Oakland aiport for like 4 hours waiting for us to come get him). The coast was beautiful. And also cold.
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I guess I will be doing this from flickr. _

Oh. Huh. Let me experiment some more.

 

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The first touristy thing we did (it was me and Jamie) was go to a petrified forest near Calistoga. According to the signs, 3.5 million years ago a volcano exploded and knocked over a bunch of redwoods and buried them in ash. It was actually very cool.

This might be the most impressive of the trees, or it might've been when I decided that they were all looking kind of the same and stopped taking pictures.

 

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/10275944@N03/2581854197/" title="Giant Petrified Tree.jpg by ToriTyrrell, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/2581854197_d6805134e0.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Giant Petrified Tree.jpg" /></a>

 

This is probably the same tree. Jamie and I were incredibly impressed that there was a tree growing through the rock tree.

 

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/10275944@N03/2581854301/" title="Tree Growing out of Petrified Tree.jpg by ToriTyrrell, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3052/2581854301_765d5669a4.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Tree Growing out of Petrified Tree.jpg" /></a> _

I've been in Northern California for about a week and enjoying myself very much. I'm travelling with family, so I haven't had a whole lot of free time for things like, blogging, or, oh, say, reading the Jeeves and Wooster book I brought along, or knitting, or watching Dr. Who (Jamie and I had agreed not to watch Moffat's two parter until they were both done, so we could watch them together, and now we have three sitting on my computer waiting for us to watch them). So, now I'm outside Sacramento with my brother and sister visiting our dad, and my uncle is out here too. The guys are all interested in the NBA finals, and we watched what might have been the end of the US Open until the basketball started. Jamie and I are being polite and hanging out, but I have my laptop out, and will be blogging the pictures I took until the last time I took pictures off of my computer. (I find sports boring. But watching Tiger Woods pull out of a terrible game into a tie for first was actualy pretty amazing.) _

My laptop has taken to turning itself off when it says I have 15 minutes of battery life yet. I don't get any warning messages that say "you are running out of battery" or anything. It's really frustrating. _

I have a bruise on my arm from bumping into the underwire in my bra while playing Wii bowling. _

I read this this morning and found it fascinating.

For the records, I don't in any way object to single sex education. I particularly don't object to the Seven Sisters, but I also think it's perfectly okay for Deep Springs to only take boys. _

Sam is trying to fly.
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I think our AC is broken. _

Yesterday, Brianne and I went to a ridiculously large mall (with surprisingly few stores, given the size of the mall, but the stores were all biger than they normally are at malls) in her unending quest to find jeans that only have cotton, and no spandex at all. She failed. I failed, too, at my attempt to "not buy too much" and I bought several very lightweight tee shirts (perfect for summer) and two pairs of shoes. I changed immediately into one of the new pairs of shoes, and then we went out to dinner. We tried to go to a movie, and we figured "there's no way Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be sold out" but somehow it was. So we went home, got a little lost and found ourselves at BWI's rental car returning area, and went home from there. We then got totally stuck in traffic on the highway. I started getting sick from sitting in a hot car (Brianne's AC works all right if the car is moving, but when it's not, it doesn't work terribly well) that was barely moving and eating really far more dairy than my stomach is generally happy with. We played this game where you look at the letters on the liscence plates around you and you come up with the shortest word that you can think of that has all the letters in order. We snarled at people who drove on the shoulder, and then hugged close to the people in front of us when they tried to get back on the road. And then I went to sleep. That strech of highway sucks. _