Happy new year and all that! And happy birthday to my sister!
Nice party last night at a big mansiony place out in the boonies. Good lazy day today watching football (USC -> Rosebowl) with the in-town Weasels and making the rest of our Xmas essens. Now I’m off to get a little relaxing massage from my sweetie!
Got in a few hours late this morning, but still early enough (8-ish) that we saw the sun rise over Sacramento. Ben was kind enough to pick us up from the station, which was great. The only hitch we had was that the Amtrak folks forgot to get our baggage off the train! We were the only people getting off at Davis (tee hee) and it somehow just slipped through the cracks. The agent at Davis called the train and was supposed to have them pull it at Martinez, but it actually made it all the way to San Jose (joke here) before someone found it. They were supposed to put it on the next northbound train, but that too was forgotten, so all told it took it till 5:00 pm to show up. I’m not a bit bothered since we didn’t have to do anything today and there was nothing in it but dirty clothes. Amtrak always impresses me with the level of customer service, even if stuff like this gets messed up in the meantime. The Davis agent called us personally three or four times today to let us know the status, and it was clear that the issue wasn’t systematic so much as so-and-so was being absentminded and so-and-so was too busy to do this or that. It makes me feel like we’re all dealing with reasonable people, like some sort of rider-and-operator cooperative that works because everyone involved loves it. Yay Amtrak.
Anyway, this morning I crashed after we got back home since sleeping last night on the train wasn’t entirely restorative. I slept way better than the trip up, mostly owing to having a fully operational seat this time, but any kind of sleeping sitting up is sure to be suboptimal. So I got up this morning for the second time a hair before noon. We ran some errands downtown after that expecting our bag to show up by three. We hit up Sophia’s for lunch, the post office to mail something for Francie, Ace for some supplies, and finally the Co-op so we’ll have some essen tomorrow. Got a call that our bag wouldn’t be here till five and we came back home and unloaded.
I picked up the luggage when it finally arrived, and then turned right around and went to the Lawyers’ for dinner. They had invited us over to see the USC / Ohio State game and tell them about our trip, and it was lovely to catch up. They’re leaving in a few days themselves to go to Hawaii for a bit as part of a fundraiser auction they won. Should be nice! As for us… orientation starts early next week! Egad. Hard to believe we’re already that far along. Summer is nearly (actually?) over and the leaves are already starting to show evidence of turnage… it’s mid-September!
