June 17th, 2001

In Fresno...

Still tired from the weekend. Didn't sleep in as much as I would've liked this morning... my internal clock is so used to early mornings that even if I'm up until 2-3am doing stuff sleeping in still eludes me.

I go for a swim after I wake up a bit... play with Coco a little. She's somewhat put off with the water being chilly the way it is. I like how it gets so hot over the course of the day but once the sun goes down the temperature dips 20-30 degrees. It occurs to me that my time in this place is growing short, and saddens me. I've really come to realize how much I've missed my relatives out here. And I will miss them even more when I have to leave.

The cross country road trip looms upon the horizon, like the mountains I see just on the outskirts of Fresno.

Alie is still suffering from jet lag today, she sleeps in late and naps in the afternoon. Planning for the roadtrip is put off another day, none of us are really in the mindset to deal with it yet.

Instead, we sit around idly most of the day. Around 2pm Dan and Tina show up, and soon thereafter Gen arrives as well. Fun in the pool ensues again... and while I've got a lot of pictures of this type of thing already I find myself wanting to take more. I guess I just want as much to remind me of it here as I can get for when I'm gone.

I'm rather pleased with many of the pictures I take of the pool... particularly of the ones of Dan throwing his kids into the air.

We all swim for a couple of hours, save for Gen and Alie. Alie naps most of the afternoon, she's still wiped.

After swimming we come inside as Sandy, Tina and Gen start doing the finishing touches on dinner. Alie and I have made plans to eat with Chris and Diane tonight, so we have to sit around as they begin eating. We're both starving and the food smells so good it's almost torture. Chris and Diane show up around 7:30pm, and we go to a local sushi bar.

I've never had sushi before, but I was curious. So we went all out and got all different kinds of it... I'd rattle off the names of all the stuff if I could remember them. I know there was salmon, scallops, eel, tuna, yellowfish, and all sorts of other assorted stuff. We tried two different types of oriental beer, Sapporo and Asaki. Something else, I'd never eaten with chop-sticks before. Chris and Diane apparently do sushi runs on a regular basis, so they are rahter proficient. Apparently Alie has eaten quite a bit of sushi while she was out in the pacific, so she's pretty good with them too. So, while we waited for food I sat and twiddled around with my chop-sticks. It took me getting through the tempura appetizers before I got to the point where I could reliably handle my food. I'd told my mom we were going out for sushi and her response was basically "eewwwwww!!" I thought the stuff was excellent, actually. I don't think I had a piece of sushi I didn't like the entire night. I made my soy-sauce/wasabi mix a bit strong though, but it was pretty good. My only complaint was the fact that every time I burped the rest of the evening I tasted fish, even though we had beer and tea with dinner and this stuff called Jamba Juice for desert.

After dinner and desert we went to Borders bookstore and got maps, a couple atlases, and a trip planning computer program. It's about time we get started on some sort of trip planning.

We head over to Chris and Diane's afterwards after renting a couple movies and hang out for a while.

This its home for the night...