An interlude with my family

After IDDS I had two weeks with my family. To be honest, it was an absolute blur. I was so drained from everything (on my way out of Colorado, I stopped by to see a terminally ill relative before going to one last networking event at the Unreasonable Institute and saying lots of good-byes to my friends at IDDS and the Unreasonable Institute) that I basically collapsed. It's too late to do anything now, but I had $10 stolen from me by the Denver-area public transit system and had a frustrating encounter with an incredibly unfriendly driver.

Anyway, I took a red-eye to North Carolina and saw my mother and my sister Claire (I hadn't seen her in 21 months at that point). As we waited for my luggage, Claire snapped several pictures of me in a state that I would prefer not to remember. It was raining torrentially as we stepped out into the parking lot, but I was glad to feel the cool refreshing raindrops. We drove up to Ocean Isle, where the extended family has done vacation since 1992 (other relatives have been doing it much longer, but that was my first trip). It was nice to see cousins, but I was pretty out of it the whole trip. I was having a terrible time sleeping and didn't feel entirely "with it" most of the time. Still, it was nice being around family and friends and not feeling any sort of pressure (actually, that's not true, since I still had a few lingering GCS tasks that I was trying to work on in my sporadic moments of lucidity). I definitely did not contribute my fair share to the housework, but I tried my best to be outgoing and participate in the activities (corn-holing was the popular game this year).

I was trying to update from Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu version 9.04) to Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu version 10.04), but my computer was having a lot of trouble with the change. It finally acquiesced, but only after Daryl (my new brother-in-law) coaxed it to accept (he did a ctrl+alt+delete, which worked with his magic fingers after my 30 failed attempts at restarting the computer). It was nice to have my computer back, though it didn't return to 100% until I was back in Tanzania.

After that, we drove back to Chicago. I don't remember most of the trip, but I was very coherent while we visited my cousin Dave in Raleigh and saw his brand new daughter (she is lovely). I really enjoyed my time in Raleigh, and spending time with more friends and family.

I remember very little of my week at home. I saw family on most of those days (and I think I tried to do some GCS work on other days), but I was typically incoherent for most of the day, and only truly present from about 1 AM to 4 AM. I usually spent that time with some of my friends from high school. (I learned a new game called Killer Bunnies, which I am now a big fan of.) Unfortunately, they were usually getting pretty tired right around the time that I was starting to wake up. Still, it was nice to have some night-owls. And they got me hooked on a British show called Sherlock.

I had incredibly vivid dreams during that time, to the point where I wasn't sure what I had or hadn't done. I discovered in Tanzania that some of the things that I was absolutely certain that I had packed were still at home. I haven't had dreams that vivid since I was on Mefloquine during my Peace Corps service. It was incredibly unpleasant, and while it has mostly subsided, it hasn't gone away completely. I feel like I need another round with my family, since both of us were short-changed by this trip :-/