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My return to seattle took two days, really. Started out with lunch at Stanford with some folks that I've collaborated with in the past.

The boardwalk at Santa Cruz is mostly empty this time of year, only a few children there with their families enjoying the vacation. the beach is wet and it's raining. the boardwalk amusement park has the looks of a lot of those parks, aged and weathered another roadside attraction that people operate and no one maintains.

The colors are faded and muted, but that might just be the rain. there's a lot of rain today, and there will be for the next couple of days. i played a bunch of pinball with a friend, did overwhelmingly well at the South Park pinball and left it with a couple of games outstanding.

Ended up sitting in a coffee place over by Cleary's house for a couple of hours. Went over to

haineux's place in hopes of involvin himolving him in my tiki bar scheme. He couldn't doing it, forfor work related reasons, so I went up 101 to Soren's

tongodeon and

matrushaka's place in SF. We went to the Tonga Room in the basement of the Fairfield hotel.

The tonga room was the largest and probably classiest tiki bar that i've ever been in. We stayed there for a couple of hours, and it was a good time. It was apparently one of the few nights of the week that there isn't a live band playing. Talked to

matrushkaka for a long period of time which was nice, first time that we really talked for any length of time. Spent the night at their place, and then hit the road first thing in the morning after breakfast and stopping off at my brother's place to try to fix his wireless router.

As I got about 100 miles north of SF, the rain started. It continued until this morning, which was pleasant at some times (there's nothing like a little freezing cold mist when you're trying to stay awake at 3 in the morning driving through Tacoma) and less pleasant at others (when you're climbing a hillside looking for a geocache. I ound one on the trip, but missed two others -- the two that I didn't find were probably the harder two. The one that I did find was at a rest stop near the Weed, CA municipal airport. It was hard to see anything while I was looking for it due to the rain, but I'm assured that it is quite scenic when it isn't raining quite so heavily.

It took 2.25 tanks of gas to make it on this somewhat convoluted trip, a lot of this trip was spent cruising right around 72 mph. The roads were almost empty after dark, and it was mostly above the freezing mark for the entire trip.

I started the music collection on my ipod as i left San Jose. I'd reached s by the time that i'd reached home, even though I skipped parts of N, mostly Nick Cave, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Nine Inch Nails. I hadn't listened to even all the music on my ipod mini in a while, so it was a lot of fun to listen to all the collage and other stuff that was stuck in between my more usual listening selections.

Spontaneous people encounters were scarce, I didn't stop much once I started. At one of the gas stations, I encountered a really hostile group of people watching fox news. They made a couple of weird comments to me, mostly based on the burning man logo on the side of my truck and the fact that I was wearing a shirt with non-english writing on it. But I think that they were basically just crazy hostile individuals, and it wasn't so much directed at me, but the world in general. The gas pumps also played an advertisement for some fox news special about how people are 'destroying christianity in the name of separation of church and state.'

The light shows that the police put on grow brighter every year. Each of the highway patrols have their own lightshows on their cruisers, oregon the most varied; california and washington are just about as bright. And then I was back home again, and it was good to see my cat.

Spent most of today napping and reading, and it's been nice to be home again. Just watched Alien vs. Predator, which was a regrettable mistake. The 'unrated' version was on sale super cheap at best buy.