salutations from the land of the bleary!

i've been getting up an hour earlier each workday, for maybe 3 weeks now. there are a couple of reasons for this but receiving immediate benefit is my employer, who has seen fit to keep me insanely busy, and of course, starbucks. i really don't understand why i'm still so sleepy when i'm making sure that caffiene has been properly installed but here i am, yawning at noon just the same. or perhaps i'm yawning at this unix script poking across my screen.

ah well. i hope you all have enjoyed some festivus of late, and a bit more this weekend. we are considering going to grace cathedral on NYE, there's a free concert there. min loves to rave about how beautiful it is, and perhaps i will finally see it on sunday!

as to what else has transpired in the last few weeks: other than the usuals and working like a bandit, i was graced with a minibreak to the coast. we rented a house because we wanted a full kitchen for a full christmas dinner! rather i wanted the full dinner since i was the main one eating, but min ate a little. =) plus the requisite apple cranberry sparkliness, mmmm. oh and for christmas i got some emily goods, starbucks AND toffee crack GC(!), an exercise mat (so sweet!), short exercise dvd i look forward to trying, cute notebooks and i forget what else, i'll have to doublecheck when i get home. but, all good stuff.

anyway the rental house -- i researched all over the bloody coast of california for a good deal, and after much calling and cajoling for pictures (first, second choices not available, but we have alternates. ok fine, send us pictures!) we finally ended up here. it wasn't until we drove up to it that we found out it was for sale and now that i'm back where the internet roams free, i'm a little surprised to find that they're including the furniture. some of it was quite nice, but otoh, some stained and broken.

oh..i get it now. the owners have abandoned it. see, this explains the bugs.

yeah, bugs. granted, it was mostly potato bugs, but when you have to:

• check the floor before getting out of bed
  
• get rid of at least 3 every time you cross a room
  
• brush them off of you because THEY DROPPED FROM THE SKY (ceiling)

it doesn't leave you feeling very relaxed. no, you probably even dream about bugs, or mysteriously harmful goo, dripping from the sky. not that i would know.

that aside, it was a gorgeous house. wonderful views, plenty of room and only a few minutes from one of my favorite restaurants ever, which unfortunately was not *quite* as good as normal but still very excellent. we ate lunch there on tuesday and planned to find a xmas gift for our neighbor penny, but across the street is gallery bookshop and as i probably should have predicted, it sucked up most of our afternoon and of course, a good deal of scrilla. that store has the best per-square-foot selection of books of most any bookstore i've ever been in, and i've been in a LOT.

by the time we escaped, it was probably only 430, but most of the other shops we wanted to hit were closed and several appeared closed for the week. tuesday night there was a nasty storm - wind howling, things clattering outside, lights flickering, the whole shebang. wednesday we figure we'll hop up to fort bragg, maybe more stores will be open there.

and maybe they would've been, who knows. however the storm played havoc with several trees across the region (would you like to wear this tree as a hat? how about doubling the thickness of your fence?). as a result, power was out in most of fort bragg. great. luckily we found that out *after* we had lunch, at smart-enough-to-have-a-generator silver's. wow that website is from 1997. anyway, we’d planned to dine at the next-door Chapter & Moon…but no one was there. and there were oh, 50 cars at Silver's, so we decided to go with the safer bet. we were *so* not disappointed, especially with the clam chowder.

incidentally i am a clam chowder snob. this is because i grew up on the best chowder in the friggin free world and everything else pales in comparison. god just seeing that building, on the website, makes me feel homesick. and ack! it burned up! i hope they can rebuild! :( anyway i am VERY happy to report that silver's chowder? almost as good as dory cove's! and much closer so i bet we'll go more often. yum.

after lunch we found all the closed shops (boo), then just enjoyed the afternoon, driving along the coast and drinking in the ocean air, before heading home. still no pics (probably get around to uploading this weekend) but all in all, a nice little getaway. and i really needed to get away, so, yay. =)