No. 186: Vacation (A Summary)

I went to London for three weeks at the beginning of the summer. I was back for a week before I moved up to Baltimore to intern for the Urbanite. On most weekends I came home. I found out that traffic can zap years from your life if you sit in it enough, especially on the Beltway. I'm thinking there's a time/space rift there.

My internship ended and I came home for about a week, wherein I helped friends get ready to move and ran errands. Last week, I was offered a trip to California with my dad. That was sort of altered to a trip out to California with my friend Nick, who's moving out there to Santa Barbara City College, and his mom, Jo (who I know b/c she used to date my dad, and she's my uncle's wife's step-cousin (making Nick my second cousin twice removed)). We spent the first three days driving Nick to school, finding him a place to live nearish campus, going to Ikea to get his apartment furniture and then putting it together. Then I took a 5 hours Amtrak along the coast from Santa Barbara down to La Jolla to meet my dad. We spent two days walking around aimlessly, hanging out with his (incredibly cool and surprisingly young) co-workers, and watching movies. We went to the Del Mar race track, which was very neat. Then we took a plane home on Saturday night.

Today, Nick and I and a bunch of his friends went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival (probably my favorite time yet) and shouted the word, "HUZZAH!" about 1,000 times. Jousting has never been so rolicking. And a 3 year old, absolutely lovely little blond girl ran up to me, looked all the way up to my eyes and said, "You're beautiful!", then hid behind her mother's knee. It was the sweetest thing.

Drove back after giving Nick and send off with all his friends in Columbia.

And now I'm home, until Tuesday, wherein I'll be going back up to Baltimore to start work Wed and then school Thurs. And so ended my summer.

Now: a shower and then blissful rest.

Cheers, you grand few.

No. 179: "Safety first! Then teamwork!"

This morning I was really excited because Jenny gave me this beautiful garden tomato and some yummy thin slice wheat bread. I was going to make a delicious summer favorite: toasted tomato/mayonnaise sandwich (the only time mayo is ever acceptable to my tastes). So I stick the toast in the oven and put it on the "toast to dark brown" setting and take my coffee to the table where I proceed to make my schedule of availability for Carma's next semester. About ten minutes later, I look up and realize that my kitchen (which is incredibly small) has filled up with smoking which is pouring from my toaster. Walking into the kitchen, I realize that the smoke is coming from the FIRE which has engulfed my little toast. Huge flames, people. Huge. So, reacting with a lot more calm than I thought myself capable, I unplug the toaster and proceed to dump two or three glasses of water onto the toast. The fire stops, and it's so hot that it dries up most of the water, so only a bit spilled out onto my freezer-- easily cleaned. I then proceeded to unplug my complete useless fire-detector which only started making piercing, annoying beeping sounds after I had already extinguished the fire and started to fan the smoke out.

So that was my morning's excitement. Going in to meet/debrief with Tracy at 1, and then no real plans to speak of. My summer starts today, which is nice. Two weeks of extreme chill before that thing which is Jr. Year.

Today's lesson: Keep an eye on your toaster ovens. Get a good fire alarm.

Cheers.
H.