Exit 71

2004-10-10 - 10:02 p.m.

So where did I go this weekend? Here I'll give you a hint:

Yes, this weekend I went to the Avenue of the Giants--the giant redwood forest of Northern California. We drove as far as Willits on Friday and spent the night in a hotel there. It rained overnight, but the weather was beautiful for us on Saturday while we visited the redwoods. Everything was damp and gorgeous.

Here in Sacramento it's still late summer, but there in the forest it was definitely early fall. That last picture shows poison oak climbing up a redwood tree with all its leaves changing to beautiful colors.

Yeah, we even paid the extra three bucks to drive through the tree in Leggett. The sign on that tree says that the tree is at least 2600 years old. I can't even comprehend that much time.

Taking pictures of trees is fun, but of course there was other stuff around, too. Like this patch of horsetails along the banks of the Eel River...

...and this spider in its web in a nearby deciduous tree.

You know I love to take close-up pictures. Here's a look at the forest floor...

...and some water droplets that had collected on the leaves of a plant. (I don't know what kind of plant this is, do you?)

Saturday evening we drove down to my maternal grandfather's house to see how he's doing. We took him out to dinner that night and spent a good deal of today cleaning up his house for him. Poor Grampa. He's so lonely and so...not totally with it anymore. He had this strange thing happening to him and he wanted to know if I thought it was serious and should he go see a doctor about it. See, sometimes his skin oozes black stuff. There aren't any wounds that this is oozing from and it washes off. I have to admit I didn't put two and two together, but my dad took one look at it and told my grandpa, "Looks like you have a bad case of gel pen." And he was right. It was just ink from a leaky pen, the mess from which we'd seen earlier. But Grampa didn't get it. He asked, "Is gelpen disease serious?" And he never did get it as much as we tried to explain.

Speaking of being out of it, tonight my parents and I had dinner at KFC. I drove them. We pulled into the parking lot, parked, and walked inside the building before realizing that we were in Burger King. In my (partial) defense, Burger King is right next door to KFC, but still. It made me feel better that neither of my parents had noticed that we weren't at the right place either, but still. Guys, I'm losing it. I'm doomed to a wondering wandering. It was a little scary, actually, to walk inside the building and have it look completely not right. I actually exclaimed (this from a girl who exclaims nothing), "Where am I??"

One last thing. Today is the two-year anniversary of the day I broke up with my last boyfriend. I honestly thought that I'd be depressed about it today, but I haven't been. In fact the topic crossed my mind about twice all day. They say that it takes as long to get over a relationship as you were in that relationship. If that's true, I'm officially over it now--we were together for about two years. It's funny, really, at the time that I broke up with him, two years seemed like a really long time. Now it seems like no time at all.