Abbie's Real Life Blog

Well, I am home and I am tired.

I really did try to avoid jet lag by getting up early every morning and going to bed early every night, but when the conference started this week, I think it really nailed the time difference home and I started staying up too late.  My boss ok’d a late morning for me today, which was good because I could not even open my eyes until 8:00am.  And now it feels like a Monday, although it is Friday and I have two days to get normal.

I had a wonderful, wonderful, fantastic trip.  I will probably write about it for days and days and days, so if that bothers you, come back in a couple of weeks when I will be writing random bullshit again.

To summarize:

• I went to San Francisco for nearly two weeks and had beautiful blue skies every day, warm weather and no fog.  I came home to a rainy foggy chilly Missouri, and we had an earthquake last night.  (Although I slept through that because the epicenter was somewhere in Illinois, but others felt it here.)
• I walked and hiked miles and miles and miles.
• And I lost ten pounds because I also didn’t eat very much.  But don’t worry, I’ll gain it all back today.
• I did eat at a couple of good vegetarian places, but mostly I lived on Tofurky jerky, fruit leather, Larabars, and trail mix, even in the city.
• I risked death several times!  And my camera fell over (twice)!
• I saw mule deer, whitetail deer, a wild turkey, a coyote, and lots of birds, and nearly stepped on the same snake twice.
• I stayed in fancy city hotels and in rustic cabins, and felt a little whiplash moving between them.
• I put 1111 miles on rental car at $4/gallon for gas.
• I fell in love with the landscape of northern California.
• I decided that I prefer San Francisco to New York City because New York doesn’t have the beautiful landscape or the rugged coastline, just boring old East Coast shore which doesn’t even compare.  Yes, New York is pretty awesome, but I love San Francisco more.
• I took about 5200 photos, which at 12.4 mb for each RAW file equals nearly 65 gigabytes of photos.  I didn’t have enough hard drive space on my laptop, so I hauled along my DVD burner and made backups and then mailed copies of each disc home as I traveled.  Did I mention my graduate degree in archives and records management?  Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS).  I will be processing these photos until the end of time.
• Generally, I had the time of my life.

And now, having checked my email accounts and changed my voicemail messages back and put lots of stuff back to rights, I am off to find some lunch.  Then maybe I will come back and start with the details.

Just to make it clear- this blog is a diary for me as much as anything.  Writing the details is important because I will forget those details in the future, and this is a reminder to me of how things went.  So while it might be boring as shit for you, it is important to me.  Thanks!