While I was cleaning up my room yesterday, it suddenly struck me that I don't know where I really live. Meenal said a couple of days ago, "It's like you live in California and you come back here for visits." Is it really? All of my important, often-used stuff—barring this computer, of course!—is in Palo Alto, but but all of my family and most of my really close friends and all of the relics of my childhood are here. A funny thing about here, though, is that my furniture feels abnormally weird: everything's at or below shoulder height. It's odd not having to climb up to my bed, and to be easily able to reach to the back of my dresser. I've even been hanging up the various cordless phones in my house incorrectly because I want to press the off button where it was located on our 227 Branner phone.

So I'm going to leave for my flight back to Palo Alto in less than 12 hours. (Weird. I instinctively chose "back.") This week at home was nice and fairly relaxing. I got to paint some of my first floor, which was fun even though it went a lot slower than I'd estimated. I got to jump on Meenal's trampoline, and go to Dunkin' Donuts, and have lunch with some random people, and throw around with Sach and Ken and Andy, and catch a firefly, and see the nest of the dumb bird that decided to build its nest right on top of our deck light (for, I suppose, the occasional auxiliary heat). The only things I did miss out on were a "full-fledged, honest-to-goodness, vigorously violent" thunderstorm and really catching up with all of my old friends. I got to hang out with most of them for at least a good while, and even had some good fun and conversations with most of them. But to really catch up with some people, all the way back to the point where we'd been before spring quarter and all its concomitant hecticness exploded into my world, would have taken a really long time... and so I just didn't start.

Roger says that's kind of sad. I agree. Anyway. I need to stop psychoanalyzing myself.

We now go to an update on the D&D situation: none near my house is now open 24/7. Boo and hiss. The Oak Tree one never was, the Inman Avenue one stopped being so, and the Parsonage Road one is being renovated indefinitely (they'd promised April, but we can see how that turned out...). On the up side, there is now a combined D&D/Baskin Robbins on our side of Oak Tree, near Wan's house! Woohoo!

As I get older, there seem to be more and more errands accumulating in my life. Financial aid applications have come and gone twice, sucking thoroughly both times. The N-400, an application for citizenship, has been fairly annoying as well. That I spend the majority of my time in one state while my technical home is in another complicates things just a bit. I'd been able to get my fingerprinting done in San Jose after two attempts, but then was scheduled for an interview/exam in Newark during finals week and couldn't get that changed without filing a change of address request. My parents forbade me to take that latter course of action since one of their friends had done it and her paperwork was lost, so I had to go in person to the INS office to try to get it changed becaused they hadn't processed the letter I'd sent in mid-May to correct the appointment.

[The following is copied and pasted from an edisonpeople@yahoogroups.com email. Sorry. I know that's lame. But rewriting it is kind of like reliving it, and I'd prefer to not have to do that.]

In other news, the western wildfires, some of the worst in recent years, are steadily encroaching on my home of two Augusts ago. It already hit a lot of Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, where we went for our longer end-of-the-month backpacking trip. I guess the fire is a part of the natural progression of things, but it's still a little sad—and a lot intriguing. I wonder what a forest fire looks like up close. I wonder if I'd ever be able to handle being a smoke jumper.