What I’ve Been Doing On My Summer Vacation

I’ve been spending this week in California with my mom and sister, taking a trip down the California coast to Santa Barbara and back up again to the Bay Area, from whence I’ll leave for Fiji the day after tomorrow LA LA LA LA LA NOT REALLY HAPPENING LA LA. Would you like to see some extensive photo documentation thereof? Okay!

First let’s start off with the little going-away party we had at the ABL last weekend.

Photo by John Larkin

Mostly we just sat around and talked and laughed and screamed (pretty Anna did do a little henna on pretty Chrysa’s pretty belly). Too hot to do anything else. We kept saying we wanted to have one of those non-sexual cuddle parties I keep hearing about but there was no way any of us were going to voluntarily touch each other for sweatiness/stickiness reasons.

Photo by John Larkin

So we just talked about other times we’d all been sticky and sweaty. Here I am telling a hilarious story, apparently, about that one time I was a phone sex operator.

Photo by John Larkin

My new girlfriend Jessica telling a story that starts out with a Mormon asking her to a homecoming dance but taking her to Denny’s instead (I think) and ends up with a French guy telling her “But Zhessica…when you asked ‘im if ‘e wanted to make out, was your ‘and on ees DEECK at ze time?” I love that story and I love Jessica. The end.

Photo by John Larkin

Sahana shares her own horrid dating story about some dude in college who, like, showed up four hours early for their date and then danced “like an enraged velociraptor” and then started stalking her and showing up underneath her window on his way to class. In the middle of the night. Sadly, no photographic evidence exists of Sahana’s rendition of the velociraptor dance.

Photo by John Larkin

Just a good shot of Sahana and Joe.

Photo by John Larkin

Do you know Rob? Then you know that a) he looks just like an otter and b) the expression on his face means he’s planning something.

UPDATE! This is my old roommate Airy, who came from Davis to see me, and who has not changed one little bit since 1993 when I first saw her face.

Ooh, hey, here is a picture of the best going-away present ever, the beautiful henna that my sweet friend Anna did for me. Isn’t it cool? It’s pretty faded now as I write this but for the first couple of days people were coming up to me out of nowhere to compliment it. She also did one on my back, of a koru fern surrounded by the words Strength Courage Wisdom in Sanskrit. She is so…I just highly recommend you get someone like Anna for your best friend, you know?

The next day Abi and Marcy and Anna and I headed out to Marin County to go to Kat’s going-away party. Traffic and airline schedules being what they were, we didn’t get to spend too much time in the blessed coolness, but it was wonderful to be there nonetheless.

Photo courtesy of Marcy!

From left to right: Kat, Marcy, Anna, some girl in an ill-advised bikini top trying and failing to suck in her gut, Abi, and Katherine.

Mom and Beck picked me up on Monday and our first stop was, of course, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for which I have already documented my deep love, although I notice the pictures have disappeared from that entry since the diary-x crash. Sigh. There was a really good one of some sea nettles, if I recall correctly.

Here’s a nice leopard shark, though.

Mom palpates some echinoderms.

And here is a picture of me sitting in a fake giant clam.

And here is a silly stuffed octopus that my friend Steven sent me, the only one of my extensive collection that would fit in my pack. I call her Octavia because I am not very creative when it comes to naming stuffed octopuses; it was either that or “Inky.” Anyway, here she is checking out the kelp forest exhibit. There will be many more pictures of this ilk in the coming weeks, I assure you. Especially at the Octopus Resort because GET IT?

See? Here’s the fake octopus by the outdoor pool at the crazy Hearst Castle.

And here’s the octopus ON MY HEAD. (Not a lot to do in San Luis Obispo at night, you know?)

Rebecca and I.

We came down to Santa Barbara two days ago and initially I was a little snooty about the whole whale watching thing and didn’t think I’d want to go. When Beck made the reservations, though, the guy told her that they’d been seeing blue whales hello, and there was no way I was going to miss that. I’m really glad I went.

We saw a lot of sea birds, including many condors and pelicans, both of which I love very much. These guys are actually fishing from an underwater “bait ball” like you see in the nature shows, where it’s all silvery and fractal and then the dolphins shoot through and freak the fish out and then sometimes a shark shows up?

Some sea lions hanging out on a buoy thingy.

Many many dolphins. They came right up to the boat and would surf in our wake, which was very exciting. Also, not pictured here, but the first whale we saw was a little minke whale that followed the boat for a while. The captain guy couldn’t get over it, kept saying that it’s super rare for them to interact with boats at all…because they’re, you know, STILL HUNTED and everything. So that was extraordinary, right there, and would have made the trip for me.

Even if we hadn’t seen this.

The picture doesn’t do the blue whale justice…doesn’t do any of the three blue whales we saw justice. It was really hard taking pictures of them because a) I suck at taking pictures and b) the digital lag made it so that I was staring through the viewfinder when I really wanted to be watching the whales and eventually I just gave up. You can just see the little dorsal fin there, but this one is about 65 feet long. It looked gray when it came up for air but then when it dove you could see this sort of blue glow where it was, if that makes any sense at all…not a whale-shaped glow, but a blue glow nonetheless that corresponded to the whale’s location and I can’t explain it but it was wonderful.

This morning Mom and I went on a little kayak tour where we saw a harbor seal and some more sea lions on a buoy, and then she and Beck went to wine country while I walked around the wharf and called a couple of Key Girls to say goodbye and spoke a little French to some other tourists and also saw this very helpful sign, a copy of which I ought to post over my closet:

We go back up to Sunnyvale tomorrow morning to go out to dinner with and say goodbye to the ABL for real, and then Monday…Monday I leave. The day after tomorrow. I’m going to have one more week of summer vacation but I will be alone and in a new strange place and I really don’t know what it will be like at all. It’s so hard to believe that I’m not just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing this fun week, that soon I’ll be doing something completely else.