Sickness is quickly waning. No joking, I went through a roll and a half of toilet paper in two days by blowing my nose every 2 minutes. It was REALLY annoying, and REALLY disgusting. Saturday morning some really amazing stuff came out of my nasal passages - CREEPY stuff...

Speaking of sickness, my heart goes out to Taragirl who is currently battling viral meningitis. It really sounds awful and I'm going to go visit her today to make sure she's doing ok - which means, I may have to put HeadStart off until tomorrow (BUT, I'm going to try to work it into the plan - I SWEAR!).

Jason called yesterday morning and we ended up going down to Redwood City in his Jeep - top down and all. It felt SO GOOD to get out of this city and see some nature - I had forgotten what trees and grass look like. AND, I got some sun - so I look kind of healthy and human again. The purpose of our trek? A recently discovered DAIRY QUEEN! I kid you not! I haven't had Dairy Queen in YEARS - we didn't even think that there were any in the area. To celebrate our discovery I thought I would get the quintessential DQ treat - a dipped cone. We asked what flavors they had and the counter girl (who were always the COOL girls at the DQ that I grew up with in Northwest Indiana) said, "Chocolate, Butterscotch, and COTTON CANDY". To which I immediately exclaimed something like, "OH YEAH!" or "UH HUH!" or "THAT'S RIGHT!" or something along those lines. What did I end up getting? (Actually, the question should probably be "WHY did I end up getting...?") A cone with CHOCOLATE ice cream dipped in the COTTON CANDY flavoured dip. Where was my head? What was I thinking? The first few bites were DISGUSTINGLY DELICIOUS, and then they just started to be DISGUSTING. I actually had flashbacks to the Monopoly cereal that was previously described here (see posts from a couple of weeks ago...) - the cotton candy dip was BRIGHT pink and, for SOME ODD reason, WOULDN'T HARDEN - that really should've been my first clue.
Well, we ended up getting back in the Jeep and taking this little winding road across to Half Moon Bay. Along the way, it was stop-and-go traffic, and sitting there baking under the hot California Summer Sun... well, let's just say that I felt all rumbly in my tumbly - like, EXTREMELY nauseous. But, then, we hit the ocean - the HUGE, EXPANSIVE ocean - and I couldn't think of anything but how incredibly beautiful California can be.

Brian and I climbed up and around Bernal Hill (we live just a few blocks from it) Saturday night. (By the way, if you've gone to the link that I provided with the pictures of/from Bernal Hill - which I hope you have since I don't go to the trouble of providing links for my own good health - I didn't take those pictures. I just found them online by doing a google search. I have no idea who "MonkeyView" is. I'm sure s/he is a perfectly wonderful person - the people in the photos look lovely and fun - but I am not "MonkeyView".) I brought along the digital camera that he got us for Christmas (which we STILL can't afford) and took some arty, long exposure shots of the lights of the city. Some of them came out REALLY well - just swirls of different coloured lights on a black background. VERY urban. If I can figure out how to post pictures on this blog I'll put one of them up.
Oh, and we climbed around in some scary, really dark wooded areas and Brian made fun of me because I was a bit frightened. I told him that if he had grown up with the stories of Crazy Man Wilson running around killing people in the Indiana Dunes State Park, then he'd be a little nervous walking through wooded areas, too. He asked me if my father was the one who would tell us these stories, and when I said that I thought so he replied, "Do you think your dad had ANY idea how much he was screwing you up back then?" I didn't have an answer.