Family: We're Back!

Since I have a general squeamishness about announcing when we're going on vacation on the internet, it may surprise some of you that we were on vacation.  Well, we were, and now we're back!  It was, frankly, an exhausting trip.  I need a vacation from my vacation!

Between the three of us, we took 193 photos and two short video clips.  Three if you count the accidental one.  :D  I am currently uploading and tagging on Facebook as I type.

The exterminator visited the day after we left, so I came home to a lovely kitchen with a crunchy, dead bug over linoleum layer.  Just the thing to walk on when you're exhausted from two fourteen-hour days in the car.  Also, I think our air conditioning is broken for the fourth time this summer.  Lovely.

We SO need to move.

Surprisingly, some of my plants survived my absence.  One Italian sweet pepper fell off the plant and got munched by bugs, but the other one is still hanging in there and beautifully red and luscious looking.  My sage plant died, but the basil and thyme are still doing good.

I did put some of those water globe things in there, but the big stand where the herbs are sucks up about one of those bulbs a day, and I just didn't have enough of them, so I decided to try to save the smaller plants instead, and let nature handle watering the big guy.  It's a drought though, so whadaya going to do?

The trip didn't cost us as much in gas as I feared it would, thanks mostly to a sparing use of the AC in the car and the fact that we do get pretty good milage.  The trip over land was well worth the aches and pains of car travel, because you see some really wacky crap on the road.  Amazing bridges, cool graffiti art, and... get this... I saw a flatbed trailer hauling what looked like a giant head from Tutankamen's sarcophogus.  You can't make that crap up.  Oh, and another huge trailer hauling what looked like a blade from a giant wind turbine.  You know how a flatbed trailer is a certain length?  It took TWO of them for this single blade.  I never realized they were that huge.

It was exhausting, but worth every penny and minute of time spent.