My hotel room was lovely. I had a giant bed with lots of pillows. I didn't have a giant 2-person tub in the bedroom, but the bathtub in the bathroom was pretty excellent, with a nice recline, lots of space, and jets. I was hoping that I'd just pass out. But noooooooooo. I was way, way too wired (to quote L, "overstimulated" like her cat, who wouldn't sleep either) to sleep. I could not lose consciousness for shit. I couldn't stop thinking about driving and how the hell I was going to get home through all of those freeway changes, alone, for an hour. I debated various ways I could try to get someone out here to "rescue" me--like, is Mauricio in town or not, I could have him and his wife drive out here and then one of them rides back with me...or something.... or maybe I should just drive back to my place, but that's an extra half hour or more and would make me go through the Bay Bridge again from here and I didn't wanna.... Either way, I didn't sleep for shit. I finally gave up on trying to at about 5:30 a.m. and decided instead to try out that lovely bathtub.

Plusses to the bathtub: lots of space, actually easy to recline in, fills up well. Minusses to the bathtub: the jets do not work at all, nor does the drain. Seriously, I had the drain in and it was clearly losing water the entire time. Grrrrr. It was nice reading in the tub while the water lasted, though.

Anyway...I knew L and her brother were going to the shuttle at 7:30 a.m. I had had no intention of seeing them off--we'd said goodbyes last night--but since I was already awake and kind of out of things to do and whatever.... I decided to get dressed and go down to their free breakfast area and see if they came in or not, no big deal if they didn't. Coincidentally, L was coming out at that time...I kind of felt like a stalker, somehow, doing that. Oh well, whatever. Neither of us was exactly scintillating over the breakfast table (though they did put on a nice breakfast spread with a lot of food options) though. She left after about fifteen minutes to go drug the cat. Fun times there. That was it. I sat around reading for awhile, then went up to my room to take another bath and see if I could get the jets to work...still no. I tried to go back to sleep again. No dice, still.

I finally get fed up and called Mom around 9 a.m. and said that I just wanted to leave already. I wasn't going to be able to sleep or stop worrying about this until I got it the hell over with, so I might as well get it over with. I actually bothered to set up the bluetooth on my phone, tested it with Mom over the phone before doing it--I normally wouldn't want to be on the phone at all when driving, but just in case. I set up the mp3 player to listen to podcasts (which worked great), had my Mapquest printout on the seat, and the GPS was on. I was good to go.

And...it went fine. I didn't get lost, I made every freeway change there was without problems. I did see one driver in front of me weaving back and forth and thought, "I must have looked like that last night." But I stayed awake enough and made it to Mom's. I then literally got into bed and collapsed, and managed to sleep for a few hours until her phone started ringing again. I gather she hadn't slept either.

I hadn't planned on driving any more on Saturday (and ah, had kind of been looking forward to someone else driving me around!), but Mom offered to treat me to a car wash, since the car looked like it had just come back from Burning Man for some reason. (L said she had run out of time to wash it.) And she knew of a place that did cleaning inside and out, which the car could certainly use. We went through the car taking out the stuff that L had left behind deliberately, like the map collection...and found things that might not have been left deliberately, like a spare pair of glasses. Oops. At some point I will make her a list of things left here to ask if she wants them mailed to her when she has an address.

The car got washed, and now it is very shiny.

After that, we went to Costco in my car so I could get a Fastrak to handle all the bridge tolls without my having to wrestle for money. Mom was actually very good about not harassing me while driving for most of the time there, but she got all bitchy at me for not parking where she wanted (more specifically, she wanted me to stalk a particular parking spot). It was crowded there and I ended up parking out by the gas station area because I wanted to refill there. Apparently her feet hurt, but I guess I was just supposed to know that and do what she wanted. (Use your words, Mom.) And then after that we drove out to Pleasanton to go to dinner...again, she was pretty reasonable until we got to the parking lot and then she started yelling at me again. Sheesh. We went to the Buckhorn Grill again because she has now become addicted to it, and then she wanted to do more shopping. But it was around 8 p.m. and getting dark and I was getting tired again, so I made her go home instead of shopping all night. She nitpicked my driving a lot on the way home, bitching about what route I'd taken home ("why didn't you take blah blah blah? why did you go on that road? why don't you do this, that, and the other thing?") and generally annoyed me.

Well, she was 50% bitchy during car time. That's still a vast improvement. I guess.

I seriously went to bed at 9:50 that night and slept on through till morning. I was freaking exhausted.

previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry