flew down to San Diego for a short visit in late December, 2003. It was my first return to San Diego since I'd moved up to Northern California and Malaya in July 2003, and while I wanted to see my parents, I had no interest in ever seeing San Diego again. It wasn't that I didn't want to see the city, I just didn't have any interest in it one way or the other.

How did the trip go? What did I do in SD? Did I ever get any sleep at all? Read on and see.

January 3, 2004

I set out last Thursday evening around 6pm, driving myself to the Oakland airport.  In retrospect, I have no idea why I drove, rather than having Malaya drive me.  We'd considered that, but thought since I was only going to be gone for a few days and since we expected there to be endless traffic at the airport with all of the "orange terror alert warning warning!!!!" security stuff was being thrown around, it would be a pain to drive me.  Plus there's often traffic going and coming back from there, and Malaya was going to be busy with some family stuff that day.

As it turned out she wasn't busy with anything that evening, and then there was zero traffic on the day after Xmas.  I made the 30 mile drive to OAK in about 25 minutes, and found zero security delays at the airport once I arrived.  The only problem there, and it turned into a speed up rather than a delay, was due to the long term economy lot being totally full of holiday travelers.  It was locked shut, which forced me to drive on to the daily lot closer to the terminals and park there.

Closer meant the shuttle bus ride was about 5 minutes long once it arrived, but at the cost of $20 a day to park there.  If I'd been smart I'd have parked in one of the privately-owned parking areas that are father out from the airport, trading 30 minutes waiting time for about $50 less parking costs.  But this was my first time flying out of OAK without a ride there, so I didn't know what I was doing.

Due to the close parking and lack of traffic I was way, way early, and entertained hopes of making it onto the earlier flight.

Southwest between OAK and SD about 15 times a day both ways, and there was a flight at 6:30, before mine at 7:00.  I was doing the curbside check in at around 5, which should have been easily early enough for the 6:30 plane, but the guy wouldn't let me go up to it, saying they were really busy that day and that the flight was full.  Basically he wanted his $1 to check my one bag in and to get me out of the way. More on this in a moment.

Once inside I figured that while the traffic had been zero and the security outside had been the same, there would probably be a ton of security to get into the actual boarding area.  I mean the news all week had been security warnings, right? And as we're all learning, the main result of heightened security is increased wait times.

Not this time. There was a very short line and I was through with no strip search or anything.  In fact, busy day at the airport or not, the whole thing went far faster than it did both times I flew from OAK to SAN back in the summer, on my two visits up here to meet Malaya.

So I'm inside and waiting for my flight with 1:45 to spare.  Which is about 1:30 more than I wanted to have, but I've partaken of the collective mind-emptying Kool Aid that says you have to get to the airport way way way before your plane leaves, even though there's no reason to do so since it's all computerized and no plane has ever left more than 2 seconds early for any reason since the Wright Bros were sliding down ramps at Kitty Hawk.

I asked at the SW info desk about moving up to the earlier flight and they checked and said there was no way; that it was totally full with a long stand by list.  Adding to the fun was the news that my 7:00 flight was delayed elsewhere, and wouldn't be leaving until 7:25.  Joy.  The flight after mine was set for 7:30, so basically they were going to have two planes leaving for the hour long flight to SD at the same time.  I was just hoping the other plane wouldn't lap us on the way.

Besides the parking lot issue, my second mistake was not eating very much before leaving for the airport.  This resulted in me sitting around for 2 hours within sight and smell of half a dozen fast food spots while my tummy grumbled and numerous overfed Americans stuffed their faces with deep dish slices of Square Pan Pizza.  I went walking around to another terminal and eventually parted with $1.25 for a bag of peanut M&M's, the type that cost $.40 at a regular store.  That was almost enough to make the $4 slice of pizza seem reasonable.  Almost.

My one solace in my long wait was my cell phone, since rather than sitting and stewing and reading, I could sit and call my relatives and bitch about how I was sitting and stewing and cell phoning.  Malaya was the most receptive to my bitching, since she was at the store and bored and considering buying left over discount Xmas candy.  Ironically enough, she got two big bags of peanut M&Ms, in the festive red/green Xmas colors, and a nifty transparent spiral track dispenser for them as well.

After talking to her and between trading numerous text messages with her, I called mom to tell her the plane was delayed, since she'd volunteered to pick me up down in SD. I then walked down to the other gate since of course they had decided to move the boarding gate for my flight, to go with the delay.  Airlines are considerate like that.

The plane did eventually arrive though, and once onboard all went well.  Mom was waiting by the baggage claim in SD, and aside from walking right past her w/o recognizing her (she has much shorter and much more silvery hair than she's ever had in the past) we had a nice greeting. She caught up to me before I'd walked too far past her.

The first night there I stayed at her place and slept in her downstairs office since they've turned one upstairs bedroom into my stepdad's office, and the other into a very cluttered storage room.  That leaves the sofa bed in the large living room, and the office, which has a few futon-type mats on the floor, but has an attached bathroom and privacy and gets relatively dark, at least at night. I couldn't go to sleep the first night, and even after mom and stepdad went to bed past midnight, which is late for them to be up, I was still wide awake and stayed up reading until around 4am, and then tossed and turned once I did turn out the lights.  I don't know when I got to sleep, but I did notice the light coming around the edges of the blinds was the gray of dawn before dozing off for a few hours.  I woke up around 10 and got up since I knew I couldn't go back to sleep in the light room. Plus I was hungry.

I don't know if other people are better at sleeping than I am, but I never really even consider the possibility that I'll sleep well anywhere other than home.  It's nothing to do with the bed or comfort level (at least if I have my pillow, which I forgot on my recent SD trip), and even though I didn't have my good buckwheat hull pillow I should have been able to get past that with just a bit of early morning neck soreness. It's also not a self-fulfilling prophecy; I have every desire and hope that I'll sleep well somewhere other than home; I just never do, almost no matter how little sleep I've had the night(s) before and how tired I am.

The problem for me is usually/always lightness and noise.  I can sleep though some noise, especially if it's street sounds or other steady murmurs, as opposed to shouting voices or something like that.  But I can't sleep in a light room, aside from the very rare afternoon nap, and those never last more than an hour or two.  I seem to be somewhat alone in this, since most bedrooms I'm in get light enough to read in about 10 minutes past dawn, and yet most people seem able to sleep in them for hours, if need be.  Hell, people sleep with the curtains open, or even the window open, and wake up at 8 or 9am fully refreshed.  If I ever go to sleep with the window open I'm guaranteed to be awake by about 6:10am, blearily staring out into the bright room and knowing I'm doomed to several hours of fitful tossing and turning as I try to doze and get up to somewhere near 5 or 6 hours of sleep.

It wasn't as bad as all of that in SD, but the room I slept in at mom's and my old bedroom I slept in at dad's were both too bright by 7am. The main problem was that I couldn't go to sleep, despite wanting to and knowing I'd be getting up by 9 or 10 am each day since I wanted to do things there.

The first night I was awake until past 5am, and got up around 10.  The second night at mom's I tried to go to sleep earlier, but tossed and turned for hours and got maybe 4 hours of sleep.  The third night at mom's I was sleepy at midnight, talked to Malaya for an hour and woke up some, read until 2 and tried to go to sleep, and at 3 after I'd laid there for an hour in boredom, I turned the light back on and read until 4:30.  The fourth night I was at dad's, and largely due to being exhausted from about 12 hours of sleep over the previous three days, I dropped right off to sleep at 1:30am, without even reading any.

Of course it was bright and blinding there early in the morning, and after spending 6-7am lying in various positions with a black t-shirt across my eyes, I gave up and got up and showered, shocking dad with my early appearance.

January 5, 2004

Continuing (and with any luck concluding) my recap of my vacation time in SD over Xmas, I'll pick up where I left off on Saturday. With a long, meandering, off topic digression!  Or not.

As for my time spent in SD, I was going back there largely to see my parents, not site-see, so I didn't go and do that much tourist stuff. After all, I lived in the city for nearly two decades, but due to my voluntarily-solitary lifestyle and personal preferences for being alone and in quiet, I really don't have many fond memories of places there.  Ninety percent of the time I was living in SD I could just as well have been in North Dakota or Texas or Honolulu, when you get right down to it.  Other than the view out the windows or the scenery on the way to work, it wouldn't have made any difference to me.

So as I said pre-trip, I was going to spend time with my parents, not to see old friends (gots none) or visit my old haunts (eh?) or even go by the beach bars to cruise for poontang (Malaya might object) or hot guys (wants none).  And spend time with the parents I did.

I ate with mom and Glenn (stepdad) the Friday night I arrived and then went on a fire tour and some shopping with dad on Saturday before dinner back with mom, ate a big Xmas turkey dinner with mom, Glenn, and dad on Sunday, went to the zoo with mom on Monday and ate with dad that night and stayed over at his house, then ran some errands with him and went to an art museum Tuesday before grabbing a big turkey sammich from mom's and saying good bye to her that afternoon before heading back to the airport.

The time flew by and I enjoyed myself, more or less, and even got some reading done, though less than I'd wanted to get to in advance.  And it was nice to see the parents, and we all got along fine.  Mom and Glenn are due to visit up here in a couple of weeks, and dad's back for a few days on business later in February.  Malaya has yet to meet mom/Glenn, though she's talked amiably to them on the phone a few times, so it should be an interesting visit.  We're thinking now about driving down to SD in the summer, taking a day or two for the trip so we can sight see some.  And we'd then spend a few days in SD once we arrived, and if there were any places there I was missing or wanted to show Malaya, we could do so with the convenience of our own car.

Future plans and my usual snark/cynicism aside, I'm glad that I can keep in touch with my parents, even though I'm now 500 miles away, rather than 15.

I'm an only child from two only children, and get along well with both my parents and the stepdad, so they miss me, plus since neither of my parents have any other close (living) relatives, I'm all the more valuable!  So to speak.

And yes, if/when Malaya and I crank out a kid or two (Well, I suppose it would be Malaya who was doing more of the cranking than I, if you want to take things literally.) there will be grandparents just lined up to spoil the little shits rotten, Malaya's mom and dad included.

Speaking of being spoiled, I didn't really get any presents from the parents, at least not of he wrapped up and ready to open type.  Mom sent a care package up here before Xmas with stuff for me and Malaya, and dad gave me a pretty large IBM stock transfer, so those were my main "presents."  I took them each half a dozen smaller gifts, with one or two from Malaya for them both as well, and they seemed pretty well pleased by those.

Dad took me shopping twice, as we hit the after-Xmas sales, and I cleaned up pretty well there, getting some great Asics running shoes for $35, on sale from $110 regular price. It's been raining and I've been sick ever since I got back so I've not had a chance to take them for a run, but I'm looking towards getting into jogging 2 or 3x a week here, as long as my knees will allow it. I'd prefer to join a gym and get my cardio on low-impact machines and do weights as well, but there isn't an affordable gym within an easy drive, much less walk, and I know myself well enough to strongly suspect that I'd end up never going if I had to drive 20 minutes to a gym where I had to change clothing and work out for an hour and shower and change clothing again and drive back home.

Which is why exercise that's good enough to keep me from getting fat that I can do by heading right out my own front door would be more preferred.

I also picked up a new snowboard for Xmas, also from dad. I had planned on buying my own, and was going to bottom feed on a mid-quality one for about $175.  However dad was feeling generous (three cheers for the slightly-rebounding stock market) and he said he'd get me any board I wanted.  I ended up picking a new Burton Bullet for $319 from SportsMart, on 20% off sale.  I didn't get boots or bindings there since I have my own that I used on my last (crappy) snowboard.  However after returning here and realizing how crappy my old bindings were (not adjustable in any way) I decided I needed to get some new ones, and Malaya bought me some Burton free riders for $100 as her Xmas present to me.  I'm still going with my old old boots, but I fail to see how they make much difference when they're just stiff things on my feet that are strapped tightly to the board, so I'm not real eager to drop another $100 for cheap ones or $250 for quality ones when I don't really have the money.

It's sort of ironic that Malaya gifted me the bindings, into which my snowboarding boots go, since my Xmas present to her was a new pair of knee-high black leather boots she picked out at Macy's.  We traded each other one roughly $100 gift, as planned in advance when we realized we couldn't think of anything to buy for each other, and didn't want to be bothered trying to buy and wrap things in secret in our small apartment.

So as for snowboarding, I'm now eager to go and Malaya is getting interested in it also, though she's never tried and has never thought herself very athletic in general. I used to think that thought snowboarding was sort of hard, even though I picked it up very quickly when I first tried it a decade ago.  But I had been skateboarding and very occasionally surfing for years and years, before that, and I have always been athletic and light on my feet.  However judging by the overweight and clumsy looking 35-50 y/o white people we've seen buying snowboard stuff and on the slopes in recent years, it's pretty apparent that anyone can do it, at least well enough to have some fun.

I don't know if that's what's making Malaya more interested in trying it, or she just wants it to be more of a couple's activity for us, but she's going to at least try a rental later this year when we go up to Tahoe for a couple of days with a couple of her best friends, one of whom is eager to try it out herself.  I've not been on a board for a few years myself, but now with my old board replaced, and a new shinier and faster one replacing it, I'm very ready to take it up again, especially now that I live in NoCal, and I'm near some really great ski areas, rather than in SD and 150 miles south of the mediocre LA-area man-made snow hills.

There will be pics of more Xmas stuff in the days to come, including the snowboard.  But for now, here are some pics from SD.

I've not had time to go through all of the shots and sort and crop and save and organize them yet, so these are pretty scattershot. Once I get the shots cropped and organized I'll put them into the vacation pages in the photos section, and add more sequential organization and more detailed captions.  Especially about the fire area (100+ more pics of that) and the zoo trip.

Captions are below the shots.

Here's a small shot of the fire area, looking out over some devastated hills up towards a canyon with enough water run off to have turned green by now.  I thought much of the hills would be covered in shoots of grass and new growth by now, a couple of months since the fires, but dad said there really hasn't been any rain at all, other than some drizzle around the time the fires were being brought under control. Come April all of these hills will be about as green as the narrow strip of land you see here.

Click this shot (and most of the others) for a much larger version of the image.

Here's a better shot of what fire does to dry hillsides.  This is right in the middle of a fairly-dense cluster of condos, and it's pretty amazing that it came right through here from the left, and shot off to the right across a street, without burning down any of the houses.  The hot winds and tremendous heat was helpful in keeping these things from burning, in a weird sort of way, since if a house didn't go up in five minutes, all of the ground cover and low bushes were already incinerated by then, leaving just a few blackened husks and burning trees behind, which didn't put out enough heat or sparks to catch buildings on fire.

So if your house wasn't completely surrounded by shrubbery, and it didn't go up in the first five minutes, it probably didn't go up at all.  Sounds like my pre-Malaya sex life. 

This is a long shot of the burned hills.  The fire damage isn't really that obvious here, other than in the black patches of ground, since it burned uncontrolled here, and all of the chaparral and ground cover and small trees and simply gone to ash.  I've biked along that trial over there several times, and yes, it's goddamned unrideably steep where it snakes up the rocky hills.

Click to see a much larger view of this very impressive shot.  I included this one mostly on its own merits, not because it shows any amazing amount of fire damage.

Now here's a shot of fire damage.  Click to see it larger.

These hills would normally be entirely covered in 6-10 foot high chaparral, brush that's dry, barky, and totally impenetratable with anything less than a chainsaw.  It's now all gone, and the bare dirt of the hills is very weird to see.  The oddest part is realizing what a dump (literally) the Mission Trails park is.  Everywhere around the trials are piles of dumped gravel, broken cement, rusted water heaters, cans and bottles, old appliances, etc. None of which were in any way visible before the fire.

Here's a shot of me, taken by dad, who wasn't quite grasping the "hold free hand up over camera to block sunlight from lens to avoid lens flare" concept while snapping way. The weather was cool in the morning, but by noon, when we'd been out walking around and taking pictures for an hour, I had my long sleeve shirt and t-shirt off and was sweaty from trekking up hills in the sun.  Reminded me how much easier it is to get exercise in SD in the winter than it is up here, and also how much more I like it cold and rainy up here.

My jeans had several charcoal-looking stripes across them shortly after this, where I rubbed against low limbs.

A shot of Prrowf, who is now more frequently allowed into dad's house than in the past, but is still far from being adopted as a full time pet.  More shots of this lazy girl kitty on her pets photo page, and there are a few more yet to add there, once I've sorted all the vacation shots.

A shot from the zoo, featuring a good-sized albino Burmese Python.  I'd put this one at about 16-18 feet, which gives you an idea just how enormous the 48 foot one from Thailand really is.

This camel was sitting, along with three of its fellows, at the edge of their enclosure, less than five feet from the sidewalk, and just on the other side of a low cable wall, and over a small moat.  As with most zoo cages, this one was designed to keep the animals in, not the people out.  Fortunately, most people stay the hell on their proper side.

The other two camels to the left of this one were busily scraping their enormous thick lips over some rocks, with audible scratching sounds, while this one was content to smack on its lips and look undignified with hay in its chest hair.

The hair was handy the day mother and I went to the zoo, since it was fricking cold.  I didn't wear a jacket, just boots, jeans, and a long sleeve denim shirt over a t-shirt, and I was cold much of the day. And I'm never cold anywhere; usually carrying my jacket around if I bother to wear one anywhere Malaya and I go.

Fifty degree temperatures and no rain... fear the San Diego winter!

This smiling fellow is the resident komodo dragon.  He's a juvenile, but nearly adult, which you can tell by the coloration; full adults are very dark, almost black, while younger ones have more color.  This guy was about 6-7 feet long, and quite politely posing by the glass front of his enclosure. His head would jerk around any time a noisy camera went off or a child shrieked, but he held still, other than that, no doubt contenting himself with thoughts about how tasty we'd all be if he could just get past the glass and reach our soft, chewy ankles.  Well, thighs, this guy was pretty hefty.

The best part about being bitten by a Komodo Dragon, assuming you are able to escape being entirely consumed?  You need about 20 rabies and tetanus shots since they eat rotting carrion all day and have scientifically-unknown bacteria and germs and diseases in their mouths, toxins that are as or more effective than an actual poison attack would be.

Ask Sharon Stone's dumbass husband, who got bitten by one in the LA zoo and didn't walk for a while.

So isn't there anything I miss about San Diego, other than seeing my parents?  Why yes, yes there is.

I miss my Gauntlet II arcade game, which has been holding up golf clubs and collecting dust in dad's garage for the better part of six years, since there wasn't any room for it in my last apartment and certainly isn't up here.  First thing when we move somewhere larger, I'm having that trucked up here and cleaned.  It's been way too long since Yellow Elf has eaten all the food lately...

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