Someone pinch me

So, after an excrutiating 10 days at my parents' house, I have arrived back in Pittsburgh, new car and new camera in tow.

The new car isn't really new, just new to me. 1994 Buick Skylark, white with a blue cloth top (though not a convertible). Maybe I'll get around to posting a pic at some point (using my new camera, of course), maybe I won't. It's got 113,000 miles on it, so it's been around the block a few times. Rides nice, gets great gas mileage (it went 260 miles on 7 gallons of gas = 37 MPG). And costs about $13 a month in insurance. Good deal.

The new camera is a Canon Digital Rebel, which cost way more money than I can really afford, but what the hell (spendthrift's favorite thought when spending money). I got it for the vacation I'm taking in August, I wanted to familiarize myself with the camera before actually going on the trip. More on the trip to follow.

In driving out here today, I not only got "driver tan", I got driver sunburn. My left arm is lobster red, my right arm, not at all. Not the most comfortable feeling. The car has air conditioning, but there's something wrong with it (so said the mechanic, I didn't even try it today....just had the windows rolled down, old-school style).

My vacation in August is with my parents and my 12 year old brother, Arn. We leave on August 1st. We're flying to Boise, and then we have approximately 3000 miles of driving we're doing until flying back on August 18th. Sound like a fun time to anyone? With the parents, in a car, for 2.5 weeks. When I first told them I'd go with them, I was kinda thinking it was a good idea; my parents aren't spring chickens, we only ever went on vacation once, mainly due to having the pet store. Other stores you can lock up and go away for a while, but pet stores require care that you don't kill everything while you're away. So we never went anywhere. Except Disneyworld once, for 5 days. So I was thinking that it would be good to go on vacation with my parents, see some of the country with them.

Then something happened. My mom bought the tickets and reality set in. Holy shit, I'm gonna spend 2.5 weeks with my parents. Somebody is gonna kill somebody else. Not sure if it's me killing someone or my dad killing someone, but shit is gonna hit the fan at some point during the trip.

We fly in and out of Boise, Idaho. Every time I say this to someone, they say, "Boise??" Yeah, Boise. The night we get in, we're planning on driving 10 hours to Crater Lake, Oregon. Then we'll take a couple days, up the coast, to Olympic Park, Washington. Seattle, the Cascades, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and then back to Boise. The 5-state tour.

At this point, I can't really back out, even if I could get my mom to not bitch at me for having bought my ticket. My mom's retina detached a while ago (last summer? summer before?), so she's no good for driving for that long. My dad would probably try to do all that driving without me, but that's because he's a dumbass. That's definitely a two-person (or more) amount of driving, so at this point, they need me to go in order for them to make their timetable for driving around to all of those places.

The original premise of the trip was to see my brother's commissioning into the Army. He's been doing ROTC the last couple of years of college, he was scheduled to get commissioned on August 7th in Seattle. Why it's in Seattle is anyone's guess, he went to school at Millersville, in PA. My mom bought the tickets 3 or 4 weeks ago, wanted to make sure she didn't pay too much for the airfare. Then, last week the Army changed the date of the commissioning to August 10th. A Tuesday. I can see having the commissioning on a Saturday, the original date. But a Tuesday? And of course, changing the date was really swell, I'm sure plenty of families will miss the commissioning.

Like us, actually. Because of the timetable of the trip and all of the stuff we're planning on visiting, we won't make it to the commissioning. My mom was going to see about switching all of the reservations around, but the reservations in Yellowstone are hard to switch, she couldn't do it for the dates that we'd need them, so the upshot is that we won't attend the commissioning. Fine by me, it certainly wasn't the reason that I was going, and from what he and my mom have said about it, we weren't even sure that we'd really get to see him before or after the commissioning. We're hoping to try to catch him while we're in Seattle though, on the original day of commissioning.

So August is pretty much the vacation, then school. I'll have about a week in between the two, maybe I'll clean up my already-messy office (?). And for now, I need to find a job. No classes to teach on my schedule, so I need some money from somewhere else, and right now I have no idea where that is going to come from. And I'd probably best not mention the fact that I can't work for 3 weeks in August when trying to get the job.

I'm gonna try to post more frequently, I've been really awful about it.