June 12th, 2001

Well, no pictures for today. This is dumb thing #2 I've done on this trip... but I'll get to that later on. All the pictures that were taken today will probably find themselves making an appearance in tommorrow's entry. For now though, the highlights of today.

Another relatively lazy day today. Woke up around the usual time, stumlbed out of bed, talked to Sandy before she left for work. Spent part of the morning responding to E-mails from people - Hi everyone at Hawkeye! :)

Went swimming for a while. Finished up and headed inside right before Sandy and Ed's pool boy came. Showered, watched a little TV, then drove out to Sandy and Ed's store before lunch.

Again, these people put WAY too much faith in me. ;) Sandy let me drive her Lexus to her workplace. Nice car... the engine purrs. I'm a little better aquainted with Fresno now, so I wasn't so god awful paranoid about driving around in it. Again, it reminds me a lot of Jacksonville, so it's almost like being home again.

I get to their shop and sit down and talk to Samantha, one of their office workers. She's been trying to get Sandy and Ed onto the Internet(and into the 21st century) for the past couple of years, and they haven't been too receptive. I got to talking to them and they're willing to try it, especially since Sandy has been reading and looking at the webstuff I've been doing and she finds it intriguing. After doing some research and after talking to Samantha, I'm going to have them sign up for DSL service, which they can get relatively cheaply here. And using some tricks I know, I can split the connection between the computers in their office relatively easily.

After meeting with her Ed and I take a quick trip up the mountain to their cabin. He has some window covering thingies he wants to install. Personally, I think he just wants an excuse to go up there(not that I blame him in the least).

Heading to Shaver Lake...

So we head up again, and stop at a local diner, called Hamburger Hut, for lunch. Afterwards we install the thingies, and go for a walk around his neighborhood. We bump into Renee, Valentine, and her youngest boy. Valentine is rigging up a wagon with some bungee cord so he can tow it behind his scooter.

We talk to Renee a bit... she talks to Ed about the block party being planned for the weekend of July 7th. She has to go though, so me and Ed finish our walk then head back to Fresno...

Back in Fresno...

I call Chris when we get back into town. I wake him up from a nap. I tell him to give me a ring when he's awake and stuff. In the meantime I sit and talk to Sandy and Ed about different things over a glass of wine. Mainly stuff involving the Death Penalty and whatnot(carry overs from the McVeigh trial).

After a while the phone rings and I get it. It's Gen calling to talk about plans for tommorrow. I'm pretty much planning on the white water rafting stuff to fall through, so I'm planning on spending the day with Tina, the kids and making another go at visiting with Chris. (more on that later)

After I get off the phone with Gen, Chris calls. His girlfriend is feeling bad, but he's going to come out and get me for dinner anyways. He just needs to shower first. So I wait around for him to arrive, and when he does, I have Ed go to the door and act like he's me. Chris finds this amusing. I introduce him to Sandy and Ed, we talk for a few minutes about different things and me and him take off.

We go to this place called Chevy's for dinner... some really good Tex-Mex restaraunt. They make their own tortillas in this huge machine that you can watch as it works (kind of like the Krispy Kreme machine). We sit down, order drinks, order food and chit chat about different things, work, the job market, personal life stuff, etc. Our food arrives and like 3 minutes afterwards Chris's cell phone rings. He picks it up and finds out that his girlfriend is puking up blood and needs to go to the hospital. Ick. Well, so much for dinner. We get doggy bags and he takes me home and gets his girlfriend and takes her to the hospital. We make plans to meet for lunch tommorrow.

Here we get to dumb thing #2. In the process of hurrying to get home and whatnot, I leave my camera in his car. Heh. Good thing I'll be seeing him tommorrow.

So I spend the evening with Sandy. She shows me a ton of old photos of my family... pictures of my grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, aunts and uncles and all sorts of other relatives I didn't know I had or hadn't ever really seen before.

I think the most eerie thing was looking at pictures of grandpa when he was my age. He looks exactly like me. Or I look like him, whatever. I mean, it's not just a passing resemblance. There are pictures where he's mugging for the camera and it looks like someone dropped me back 60 years in time and put me in different clothes. When I get the camera back I'm going to try to get a picture of him up... it's... uncanny. I guess I must take after my Dad's side after all. ;)

Anyways... tommorrow's another day. Hopefully I'll have pictures up again.