Family Visit

So I'm staying in a hotel in Yuba City with no serious time constraint on account of I don't need to meet my mother until 12:30 and can thus sleep in. Naturally, I end up waking up almost an hour ahead of my alarm clock. Oh, well, it made for an unhurried morning. I had the final round of the Open Championship (golf) on in the background as I had breakfast from the hotel's minimal offerings (a couple of types of cereal and cook-em-yourself waffles that I didn't have since I shouldn't eat that many carbs for breakfast, especially when my overnight blood sugar is high like it was) and read my mail. I then packed out of the hotel and drove over to where I was to meet my mother. I was a few minutes early, and she ended up pulling up right next to me about two minutes after I arrived.

After her illness, she has a very limited diet, but the deli counter at New Earth Market in Yuba City (a Whole Foods-like store) has a number of things she can eat, while they also had stuff I like, so we had lunch there and talked over matters of family business (like my late grandfather's house in Challenge) that were the technical reason for my visit.

Mom said that my sister would like to see me even though she's spending most of her time sleeping, so after lunch, Mom went off to do errands and I went over to see Kelli. She got up and we talked for maybe half an hour, but she's pretty frail and it didn't take long before she had to go lie back down again. She did say she was glad I visited, however.

The drive back to San Jose was uneventful, but hot. The van's air conditioning was able to keep up, but just barely and with running on max at full tilt, both fore and aft. I was glad I had no significant hills to climb since I would have had to turn off the AC to keep from overheating. Even in the flatland conditions, running continuous full power AC for that long runs the temperature up to where it's flirting with the yellow zone. I was glad to get back to my little apartment and crank the air conditioning up to high.

Hail Hail, the Storm's All Here

When I got back to San Jose, I had four voicemails from Lisa on Skype. Alas, the microphone on her computer had come unplugged, so they were all blanks, but I called her back. She's been having severe thunderstorms in Fernley, to the extent that Lisa had a look at the clouds on the horizon and thought there were the beginnings of funnel clouds. We aren't sure if you get tornadoes here, but she got travelswithkuma in his travel pack and made sure she had access to what we're calling the storm shelter, that being the one room in the house that has no windows and is as near the center of the house as possible. Fortunately it didn't come to that, but there were some wild winds and heavy, short-lived rains. It cooled down nicely when it was raining, but after each cell moved through, Lisa said it then got miserably hot and humid behind it. But as of 9 PM tonight, nothing blew away and everything is where it should be.