Well, so now I'm back in the homeland. My trip was pretty uneventful... no trouble at customs, only slight trouble walking in "heels" with nylons, no major fallout from eating nothing but mini-pretzels and tomato juice for 5 hours.

My first full day home was the 4th of July, and definitely my biggest dose of US patriotism in a good long while. Excellent times. We saw fireworks, we set off fireworks, we ran about with little American flags. I ended up hanging out with a whole pile of my better friends from middle school - some have changed a fair bit, some not at all. One's married to a girl who seemed quite nice but said very little, one's engaged to a guy who was quite nice to me but seemed rather taken aback by the "oldschool" crowd. The Glendale fireworks were actually pretty wicked - they went totally overboard, and it was a rather damp night so there were a bunch of misfires and low-explosions, which really just made it better. The cloud of smoke blew in our direction, so that by the end of the fireworks we had about five feet of visibility, and a lot of foreboding shadows wandering in the mist. We then went back to the nearest house, watched this fantastically hokey movie Swimfan, drank soda (or in the case of a couple of us Bud Light, which is about the same thing), and then set off a whole box of ranch-themed fireworks, which was just about the most fun I've had in this country ever. I'll get up some pictures when I figure out how to do that with the laptop.

The rest of the time I've been wheedling my dad through the process of cleaning up the upstairs. He did a great job on my room before I got here, and now I've added a few little touches and am starting to feel pretty happy with the homeyness of it. Curtains and a photo frame and a new light fixture are definitely in order, but there's a fairly good chance that'll happen in the next couple days, so all is well. The main project so far has been the next room over, the one always known as "the dressing room", but which since my departure in high school seems mainly to have been used as a dumping ground for all the things that need dumping but don't fit in the hallway. I've always wanted that room (my room and this one are west-facing over the yard and woods, and get gorgeous sunlight and a beautiful green view for most of the day) for a reading room, and I think I've really sold him on the idea. Now if only we could get, say, 20 more boxes of stuff out of there. It could happen.