Back from the beach

Back and sunburned from Cambria, which is a little strange because it really wasn't very sunny while we were there. I've narrowed the time frame of the offending rays down to a particular walk along the boardwalk, about an hour's worth at 9:30 am on a day when it was kind of half-sunny-half-cloudy. I've narrowed it down because when we left I was pasty and when we returned Leslie said I looked like a big glowing head. I'm taking that as a compliment.

Our trip to see my family was fabulous - we accomplished next to nothing, which was exactly what we were looking for. Cambria always kinds of reminds me of Asheville in that it's very picturesque and populated largely by part-timers and artists who probably can't really afford to live there, but with an ocean where we would expect to see mountains and the price of everything doubled or, in the case of houses, quadrupled.

One of our only deliberate acts besides eating, wine-drinking and ambling lazily during the week started out fun but ended with kind of a vague uneasiness. We were sitting on the front porch trying to convince my parents that the one thing they need desperately but don't have is a dog, when lo and behold (how often does something really happen "lo and behold"?), one appeared from out of nowhere.



We would find out later his name was Hercules, but to me he looked like a Barney, so that's what I called him as he sat down contentedly next to my dad and then, moments later and with an assist from my eight-year-old nephew Noah, as he streaked madly throughout the previously very tidy and dog-hair-free house, looking for either an escape or a room of his own.

On those few occasions one or more of our dogs has escaped and we didn't know where they were we were frantic, and though this dog had a collar but no tags we assumed his owner was as well so we hooked up a makeshift leash and took him for a walk through the neighborhood looking for his home. Nobody recognized him until a guy came riding up on a small motorcycle and flagged us down. He told us Hercules had been upset by the previous night's fireworks and escaped, and he explained that he was out looking for him because the last time he had escaped it cost him $200 to get him out of the pound. Any particular concern for the dog remained unexpressed.

Leslie politely suggested Hercules could use some tags and the guy claimed quite unconvincingly that he had some somewhere. Since he was on a motorcycle we offered to walk Hercules back to wherever he needed to be but he said no, he likes to just run alongside. Hercules didn't look in any way excited to see this guy, nor to run alongside a motorcycle on stumpy little basset hound legs for that matter, but we didn't have any real reason or right to do otherwise so we handed him back over. Saying something along the lines of "you're in trouble now, dog," the two of them rode off. At least he rode reasonably slow.

I know we're probably a little over the top with our dogs, but I really don't understand why people bother to have them if they aren't that way themselves. They can be quite a bit of trouble - not to mention expensive, as we were reminded after our vacation by the pet-sitting bill and the bill for the emergency vet trip for Fife after the Fourth of July sparked some stress-induced gastrointestinal fireworks - so why would you have one unless you were going to enjoy him? Maybe the guy was just trying to act cool, I hope so anyway. It looked to us like Hercules deserved better.

The only tough part of visiting my parents is the flying, since it generally takes a full four airports to get from Greensboro to San Luis Obispo. The trip back was particularly irritating. As good little post-9/11 Americans we got to the airport an hour ahead of our flight even though it was to be the first one out of the gate at 6am, and we got as far as the runway before the plane broke down. It took them four hours to fix it and get us on our way to Los Angeles, and by that time all our other connections were blown so we didn't get back to Greensboro until 11pm, which accounting for the time difference was a travel day of 15 hours.

On the plus side I got most of the way through an interesting book called "Riding Rockets," a memoir by space shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane. Normally I try to avoid using the restroom on an airplane if possible, not just because there's always a line and the concentrated usage raises sanitary issues in my mind, but also because the loud, strong, liquid-free suction of the airborne flush somehow strikes me as more aggressive than I prefer my toilets to be. But on this trip the urge struck just as I was reading a section on how the space shuttle astronauts go, and let me just summarize by saying that it involves complete nudity, knee braces, a condom, an in-bowl video camera monitoring system to help with aiming, and gravity-free personal rinsing. The economy class facilities seemed positively opulent by comparison.