And we’re back! With many misadventures along the way which I will share with you momentarily, but first a warning that there are lots of photos ahead, so I apologize in advance for the slow load.

So the day we’re supposed to leave I wake up and Bruce tells me he had just called the hotel where we had reservations and they said their “pet-friendly” policy does not include rabbits. We assumed “pet-friendly” meant pet-friendly, not just dogs. Silly us. We learn that if we bring her there will be an extra $125 charged on top of the room fee and we will be kicked out. Holy shit…we can’t leave her here, and most of our friends have dogs. Teresa to the rescue! A friend in Los Osos, who is also a fellow bunny-lover, saved our asses. Plus she didn’t even yell at us for dumping half the contents of our fridge on her doorstep! Can I pick friends or what? THANK YOU Teresa!

Then the gas company comes to shut off our gas. We are told that little leak I have been able to smell off and on for ages is not a good thing. They tell us that the leak (and it is next to our bedroom no less) will require jackhammering and carving up our driveway. At this point I am smelling panic, not gas. But they promise it will be done that afternoon so that the tenting can proceed as scheduled.

Then Bruce leaves for work. My job is to pack our suitcases and bunny, and get them in the car, after removing all our plants and the remaining things we do not want tainted by the other killer gas that is coming after the gas company.

I should mention here that the idea of this whole house being filled with a hot toxic cloud really freaked me out. The only thing that helped me deal with it was the idea that our only other option would be to simply let our very expensive investment get turned into sawdust by termites.

Anyway I am doing all of this while monitoring the twins. Have I mentioned the three of us were sick, while I did all this? Packing, moving, saving, monitoring, calling, etc.? Finally I get all our shit and the twins in the car (my IC meds almost needed their own suitcase) and we leave to go get Bruce and drop off bunny at Teresa’s. It has taken five hours, but I consider it a miracle that I have performed at all in my condition.

We drive and drive. When we get to Monterey, the girls are completely jacked up and hardly ready for bed—the result of a long car ride and being in a new place. I finally convince them to get into bed around 9, but they climb out about a dozen times and do not actually pass out until 10 or 10:30. They will be demons tomorrow, and there is nothing I can do about it. However, Bruce had some stern words with the lady at the front desk about the misleading statement on their website, which netted us some free tickets to the amazing aquarium. Hopefully this will keep the cranky behavior at bay (no pun intended) on Friday.

The next morning we go to Santa Cruz. Bruce has made it clear this is not optional, since there is nothing he likes better than revisiting his old happy memories of boardwalks in New Jersey before they became rundown havens for drug lords. We get there and notice the boardwalk is very crowded.

“What the hell?” husband says.
“I guess all the telecommuting dotcommers from Silicon Valley decided to take the day off,” I said. This was a wild guess and more of a lame attempt at humor than anything else, but it appeared I was right:

We saw dozens of Googlites that day. After a while I didn’t see them anymore, and I was glad not to have to deal with the constant reminder of the job I’ll never have.

Then I was allowed an hour—a WHOLE HOUR!—to check out the madness downtown. I think these photos accurately demonstrate why I love Santa Cruz’s downtown:

I bought an American Apparel t-shirt from the bookshop. I like it because it is soft and suggests that I might have boobs:

Here are the Santa Cruz pictures I took a couple of months ago, because I am tired and haven’t had a chance to upload the current ones.

The next day we did the aquarium while Bruce was off at a conference, where I took all the usual banal jellyfish pictures that everyone else has taken and that is where the girls fell asleep. I saw this later when we picked Bruce up from the conference.

And now, now we are home, and we have been taking cold showers and cooking with a camping stove because SOMEBODY (oops, that would be me!) forgot to call the gas company and tell them to turn our gas back on before we came back. And not cooking much really, because we had to throw most of our food out.

This picture here?

Bruce loves a fridge that looks like that. This is roughly what the fridge looked like when I met him. There is this postcard of his on the fridge that is supposed to be “ironic” and “funny”—it says: “Stop poisoning your body with food!”

By the way, here is what Sulfuryl Floride gas does to plants:

This is why we went a little crazy getting our stuff out of the house. I know we removed more than we had to, but we are superstitious hippies and it gave me the chance to organize a few rooms for the first time in over three years. On our first night back I tried not to think about the plants and what they looked like as I fell asleep in our still-slightly gassy house, eyes burning.

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Links
Which is more violent, the Bible or the Quran? (Just guess!)
How to save YouTube videos (it works)
Strange all-wood bike
NowPublic.com - nifty idea
With names like Satan’s Blood, you know it has to be hot