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Showing posts with label home. Show all posts

27 December 2010

home!

Merry Christmas from Oakland! We are home, too briefly, having left Japan on Japan's Christmas afternoon to arrive on San Francisco's Christmas morning, which meant a great portion of our 39 hour long Christmas was actually spent with my family!

Real blog posts to come, about fake tattoos and all the food we're eating, but in the meantime, rather than writing anything new, I have figured out how to add my old blog entries from the previous blog to this one, so that you can find all (well, most) of my photos, incoherence and abuse of the word 'awesome' in a single convenient place! Because the formatting is slightly different, I'm doing it entry by entry, and because I have the attention span of a goldfish, they are not, sadly, being added in chronological order (though they will appear as such, once they're added). But for now, at least, you can read my favorite blog entry, about the vastly underrated Segovia Witchcraft Museum, as well as pretty much everything else I wrote during my Fall 2007 backpacking trip, which was when this whole blogging thing started. You can also see Iain's first (uncredited) appearance in this blog, as one of the shadowy motorbike drivers in the second to last photo of this post.

16 February 2008

Last Day

Not pictured: the couple trying to enjoy their romantic evening about three feet to my left; me, being an annoying, anonymous third wheel on about seven different dates.

From the parking lot at the Rockridge Long's Drugs.

A few last images of the Bay Area to last me till I get back; on Valentine's Day I drove up to Grizzly Peaks to take photos of the sunset, not realizing that the cliffs would be overpopulated with scads of couples trying to have a nice evening without me and my camera wandering around them. Because I'm a) scattered on the best of days and b) thoroughly braindead after the last not-awesome month and a half, I locked my keys in my rental car (left them dangling in the ignition, actually, right after congratulating myself on remembering to lock the non-automatic doors) and spent a few panicked moments thinking I'd be marooned somewhere on Grizzly Peaks in the dark and the cold all alone. Fortunately, because I am a) scattered and b) braindead, I did not, in fact, lock *all* the doors to the car, and so skirted extreme pathos by crawling in the backseat. I bet everyone is really glad I'm about to go wander all over the planet now all by myself, right?

I started writing this at the Rockridge Starbucks yesterday in the midst of running a flurry of last minute errands (extra memory card! advil! groceries for a gigantic dinner I decided to cook for everyone!) but the wireless kept flaking out, so I'm actually writing this in the international terminal at SFO (where I have about 2 hours left on my Starbucks-purchased T-Mobile access!), where I am drinking overpriced tea and trying not to get all panicky at the thought of being somewhere utterly unfamiliar for quite so long after spending a nice, soothing week at home with puppies and family and way too many excursions along Skyline. But it's okay, because in 12 hours I will be in Japan (Oh my god, I'll be in Japan!) and then I promise to start writing more coherently (ha) and not overusing astericks, "awesome" or parentheticals. Right.

13 February 2008

Berkeley (countdown: three more days!)

Lucy the new puppy!

Probably I need to start being more creative with my blog title posts; at any rate, I'm back home(ish) in Berkeley for about ten more minutes before I head to Japan for a few days before landing in Ho Chi Min City on February 23rd. In my short time here, I have already managed to fry my mother's computer into oblivion (I swear I just restarted it and now everything is gone. I should not be allowed to touch ANYTHING), get bitten by a teething labrador puppy, make my usual aimless drive up and around Skyline (and now Grizzly Peaks!) and spend way too much time at Starbucks milking the 24 hours of overpriced wireless access I bought in a fit of internet-deprived desperation. My last week in Brooklyn was cold and sleep deprived and nerve-racking, and it was surprisingly easy to leave it behind after a 24 hour stretch of frantic packing, painting, moving, cleaning, landlord-finagling and plodding through the abruptly freezing cold all over two bouroughs taking care of last minute detritis (yay, hepatitis vaccines).

Goodbye, best kitchen in the whole wide world.

So that's it, then; the Brooklyn existence is all packed up and painted over or, at the very least, languishing in a storage facility. I am slightly burned out and brain-dead right now, and prone to telling my entire life story whenever people make the innocent mistake of asking simple things that SHOULD be answerable, and probably are, for most reasonable people, such as: Where do you live? Oh, you're going to Vietnam? For how long? Probably this is why I got detained at Immigration when I arrived in London last fall, which I never wrote about because it was just that embarrassing, but it totally happened and it was actually kind of hilarious.

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02 October 2007

home

Berkeley BART!

I was home(ish) in the Bay Area for about two seconds this weekend where I mostly stayed in totally new places (my stepdad's house in the Berkeley Hills - with its corresponding fancy looking and equally unfamiliar BART station - and my sister's cool San Francisco apartment with its view of Alcatraz). I didn't do too much due to time constraints, though I did manage to do what I always end up doing when I go home, which is get lost driving around the mountains on Skyline and now - thanks to John's North Berkeley location - Grizzly Peaks) and wandering around the ginormous Longs Drugs in Rockridge that I swear sells everything ever made ever and where I have probably spent several months worth of my life, though this time I actually had the legitimate excuse of getting travel provisions (hooray for shower flipflops and cold-eeze!)

Anyway, I need to clean the apartment before running a bunch of last minute errands before jumping on a train to New Haven tonight, so here are some more photos of why I love the Bay Area.

View from Skyline (taken in December with the fog rolling in over the lights of the East Bay, as I was too busy being lost this time around to take many photos)- Wouldn't you want to spend all your time up there too?