So I'm up at 7:00am, get dressed and ready, and wait about three hours before everyone else is ready to leave. I'm not a whiner or complainer and it's my vacation time to relax, so although I'm excited to go to the beach, I wait patiently. Ashley's friend checks the forecast, sees that it'll be upper 70s and gets excited because she can wear a sweatshirt.
Let me tell you, I love my sweatshirts, jeans, and sweats, but if it's California and it's in the 70s, we're wearin tanks and shorts, thank you.
We get in the Jeep and head to the beach. Arriving at Pacific Beach, I see a bunch of surf shops with hoodies, and I'm set on finding a hoodie if it's the last thing I do. And I know that sounds crazy and hypocritical after my last paragraph, but at home I can wear then all the time, so I'm future-shopping. Like when you buy appliances and housewares before you move out of your folks' house. Future-shopping. Although these shops are open and beckoning me to enter, we head to the beach first and I have no complaints.
The sand is warm, soft, and deep. It goes all the way to the breaking waves of the shore, not to a 6-foot borderline of seaweed and froth like we have back home in Washington. There aren't many rocks-- just the occasional shell of a clam and the broken remains of a sand dollar. The water isn't freezing, yet still refreshingly cool with the warm sun shining down on you, making the perfect temperature ying-yang at your core.
Don't get jealous yet. We were there for a whole six minutes before we had to leave. For some reason, Ashley's friend didn't want her son at the beach for very long and we left. No stopping in any shops, just left.
No complaining on this vaca, not while Ashley and I crave cafe sandwiches. We drove around looking for somewhere that had them, and then the little boy said he wanted to go to a burger place and his mom whipped into a parking place and we went inside.
No cafe sandwiches today, I guess.
The place was called Hodad's and although it wasn't what Ashley nor I wanted, it was pretty good. The seating and decoration was very homie, with license plates covering the walls, booths and a long picnic bench in the middle, and a chopped VW bus for a two-seater.
The burgers were good, the fries were good, and the soda I used to take some knock-off Excedrin Migraine was good as well. Why am I getting so many headaches? I just went and got adjusted, so that can't be it. It's not my contacts because my prescription was from a fairly recent exam [unlike Ashley's, poor thing. She's been wanting to go to the store and get some new ones because hers are old, cloudy, and scratched, but for some reason things conveniently come up and we end up driving the opposite direction. When we're out and about on our own this evening, we'll be sure to go get some for her. I'd be bugging everyone to take me to get new ones if I was her]. I wonder if the flight and the air compression messed it up or something. It sucked when I was flying. Maybe someone has some kind of Valium-like something to make me more relaxed while on the plane. Nothing illegal or anything. No thanks.
Anyway, after the food we walked to the nearest beach [Ocean Beach. Funny name]. We were there for maybe 15 minutes this time and then we had to rush home to get the kid to bed for his nap. Ah!
He woke up a bit later, re-energized and just as crazy as he was this morning and last night. Although he was shy at first, it was a complete facade. Too bad because he is incredibly loud and my headache is still lingering. We got up and headed to Costco to finally get Ashley her contacts. Although I thought it was going to be an in and out deal and then drop us off in town so Ashley could see her friends at the tattoo shop, I was wrong. They went shopping for dinner meats, meaning we had to come back to put them in the freezer. Honestly, it was feeling like it wasn't a vacation, but a "chance" to tag along with a loud and rambunctious child and his mom. Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate their hospitality and openness to having us as guests in their home, but it was more like having us as ghosts in their home.
To make things even better, the line for the mocha smoothies outside the store was astronomically long and I didn't get the one thing I wanted. Oh well, at least later on we were getting a hotel in town and getting a bit away from the noise.
...or so I thought.
Turns out, I had no clue what was going on at all and we were just going to stay at the noisy family home for another couple nights. I guess it's okay because I'm saving money but I would like to be able to just shower and not worry about making it quick or anything. I guess I'll just have to do this at home on Thursday night. I'll probably fall asleep in the tub because my plane arrives at 8:00 at night and Andrew wants to go out to dinner to celebrate being together again.
I love this man.
So anyway, we looked at hotel pricing online and although it wasn't too bad [$52 average for the four hotels we were looking at], Ashley decided that it'd be better to stay and save the money to go to Sea World. I hope it's worth it because although everyone is asking if we're going there, I've heard that it isn't that great. Don't want to go in with low expectations or high ones, so I'm just going to be unsure about it until I'm there. But tomorrow morning we will buy the tickets online and go in the morning with the kid and his mom and they'll leave shortly after [most likely 11 minutes ... their average time spent at places]. So Ashley and I will stay for as long as we want, take a bus to GasLamp or something for shopping and food, and take the trolley back "home" to La Mesa ["the table." What a lame name]. So at least we won't have the screamer all day.
I'm feeling a little pessimistic. I think I just need some kind of coffee drink. Too bad there's nothing but Starbucks here. Literally like 20 locations in the SeaTac airport and then right off the plane in San Diego there was another one. It's an infestation. And they don't have that great of a selection. Whatever I suppose. I don't work for them and I never will. My drink I got at the SeaTac airport [caramel frappuccino] was basically all whipping cream, heavy cream. Lame.
Enough.
So we left to bring the kid to Awanis or whatever it's called. It brought me back to the time when I was younger and my sisters and I were scammed into going with the neighbor boys. It was me and my two younger sisters and we went to this place and did bowling games and tag games and it wasn't too horrible considering these boys were homeschooled, socially inept, and absolutely eccentric. But then we split up into age groups and I went one way and my sisters went another way. Of course, since they were younger, they got to play more games, but I was older and had to actually do work. We wrote down passages and told stories. When I realized that it was a church thing we were attending and we were being preached to, I immediately wanted to go home. I can't remember if I cried or was just silent the whole time, but when I got home, I vowed never to try something like that again.
I'm not sure what it is or what but I have never been religious or open to a religious lifestyle. When I was even younger, we went to this church that took us girls into some room and "saved our souls" by having us take the Lord's name as our saviour or something. We took turns saying it outloud [I went last] and even then, I knew I didn't mean it but was only saying it to avoid people looking at me like I was a freak and to avoid my parents being disappointed in me.
Two weeks later, we were baptized at the boat launch at Big Lake. The only thing I experienced then was getting wet in my clothes and hating the fact that my pants were stuck to my thighs [back when I wore super huge jeans]. I never understood the whole Jesus and The Bible get-up. It never made sense to me and I didn't have a reason when I was younger. I still don't, but why did I doubt it? Off topic, I know, but I'm trying to blog non-stop so that I at least get something out of this time I've spent sitting around and riding in cars.
After dropping the munchkin off, we drove to Dutch Touch, a tattoo shop where Ashley got her tattoo done a long time ago. She said hello to her tattoo artist and friend and the only time possible for her artist to work on her tattoo is tomorrow at 2:00 in the afternoon, the entire two weeks she is in California. So, instead of going to SeaWorld, we're supposedly going shopping in the morning and then to the shop so she can get work done on her tattoo. I'm not counting on anything and I'm not getting my hopes up for anything. I guess we'll see tomorrow what actually happens.
Right about now, 6:45 at night, is the perfect temperature. It's not too cold, not too warm. Goldilocks would have been ecstatic. Anywho, we were done at the tattoo shop and were all thirsty. There's nowhere like BigFoot anywhere around, so we start driving for somewhere to get something to drink. On the way to this somewhere, Ashley's friend says, "Well, since we're here, I need to go to Trader Joe's." So once again, we're off running errands with her like ghost people.
Then she redeems herself by finding a little coffee shop where they had a talent night going on. I got a blended chai with half the flavour [he said for a 20oz they use 2 scoops, just like BigFoot does] so I customized it to be perfect.
Can you guess what didn't taste great? Honestly. Their scoops must be a quarter of the size that ours are because it was watered down like I've never tasted. Yuk yuk yuk.
So then we drove back "home" where we got about five minutes of relaxation before the kid came back. And here I am, up to date with all activities. He literally just ran in the door and started tripping over things and babbling everywhere. It would be different if it was my kid. I think I'm just in a pessimistic mood over all of this. Less than 48 hours until I'm back in Seattle, back with the clouds and rain, the dogs and the love of my life, back to driving like a granny and getting away with it because only 50% of the drivers there are assholes compared to 100% here, and back to blogging on a computer where the spacebar actually works. I'm blogging on my phone in the Notes section, converting every 500 characters into a text and e-mailing it to myself.
It's that worth it to blog.
Progress into the future a little bit. Now, two hours later, I am here playing Sudoku on my phone. It was a $5.99 download, but I figured if I needed something to do besides blog, it'd give me something to do.
And I was right.
Here I am, trying to waste time while Ashley's friend and her friend's boyfriend watch episodes of Heroes from whatever season is on cable right now. I haven't seen any of the first ones and neither has Ashley, and they're trying to explain everything that is going on to her. So, I'm trying not to listen and trying to focus on making these numbers fit.
I wonder if they have Minesweeper on here and if it's easy to maneuver. I played it earlier on the computer when everyone was napping. It's fun to be able to play it efficiently. Same with Sudoku. I feel smart and challenged by it. Something new
every time. And with hundreds of thousands of different puzzles to solve, I think the $5.99 was worth it.
Oh, and I might be blogging as October's Basista of the Month. No big deal. I love love love working and am excited that everyone voted for me [well, the ones that did anyway]. That people think I deserve the recognition. I'm a hard worker and it feels good to know that it shows. I'm still hoping that Murphy and Moses are dogs of the month too. If it's either or, I'd rather have the dogs up. They're amazing.
So I decided would just go to bed because there's nothing else for me to do, and they turned on the lights after having them off for an hour. Ah!
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