Well, I'm back from New York the State, but not without some nasty bug that I picked up while I was up there. So I'm sitting here feeling awful but knowing that I can't get to sleep yet, no matter how much I may want to (and I'm apparently sick enough to hit send when I didn't want to either, hence the horribly broken page for anyone trying to hit the page as I'm finishing writing this...). However, it was a fun trip.
Some points/thoughs/highlights from the trip:
- I didn't originally leave Raleigh a midnight as was planned, since we (I had driven over to my parents' place and we were going to drive up together) wanted to wait out the last of the snowstorms that were rattling the Northeast. So we left around 6:00am. I do remember stepping into my parents upstairs bathroom after waking up around 3:30, looking at a book titled "How to Build and Design Patios" and reading it as "How to Build and Design Pathos". My brain works in funny ways sometimes...
- We stopped roughly halfway through the trip at a Cracker Barrel that my mom swore up and down was in Delaware. I started getting skeptical when I climbed out of the vehicle to see a Maryland flag flying from a hotel next to the restaurant. I was right; the Cracker Barrel was a good 30 miles from the Delaware border.
- Speaking of the First State, is there actually anything in Delaware? Granted, I-95 only goes through a small corner of the state, but I couldn't see anything of note besides a giant bridge as you're leaving the state and an excuse to milk the driver for 6 bucks over roughly 30 miles of road. Any Delawarians (Delawegians?) out there want to set the record straight?
- I know that I don't want to live in New York, no matter how gorgeous the countryside is.
- Some people get jet lag. I get time lag from trying to function on a "normal" schedule. This was the probable cause behind the hour-long nap I took in the rental van during the birthday party on Saturday. The large number of people in the living room may have had something to do with it too, but I'm not going to say that... ;)
- The highlight of my trip came on Saturday. I was taking some pictures of my niece after she was done with one salvo of presents (and there were a lot of presents!) when she decided that my camera was interesting. This led to the best picture I took all weekend: an extreme close-up with her face filling up the frame. I liked it, so I hit the review button on my camera and showed her the picture. She was enthralled, so I started going back through the rest of the pictures I had taken up to that point. I don't know if she knew what she was looking at, but there were lots of pretty colors there to hold her interest. It was the only point during the trip that I got a glimpse of the wonder with which she sees everything, and it's intoxicating.
As you can probably guess, I do have pictures, and as soon as I feel good enough to deal with them (it's easier to write than it is to finesse the pictures one-by-one in a graphics program—at least for me) I'll start putting them up. Hopefully you'll find them interesting.