Day One-hundred-and-fifty: Give love

I still read the Huffington Post although my topics have expanded somewhat.  On an economic article about how the retail stores are in a pricing death spiral, a short comment just jumped out at me:  "Give love.  It costs nothing and the payback is enormous."

It is late and I have an early day tomorrow, just not for the reason I had originally planned, but that is the nice thing about a Life after Layoff, my plans can change without impact to my life.

To make a long story manageable, my youngest daughter and her spouse and in-laws arrived just as the bread came out of the oven.  So they packed the Prius with their hiking/camping gear and we took both cars out on the way to my oldest daughter's in-laws.  Along the way they parked their car at the sea end of the "skyline to the sea" trail and the five of us completed the trip to my oldest daughter's in-laws.

There we had too much food disguised by the amount of time it took us to eat it.  They had made several dishes for me to eat and where there were non-vegan equivalents, like the mash potatoes, gravy, stuffing, ... I was the only one eating from "my" foods' serving bowls.  Before I knew it, I had eaten far too much.  Even the walk before dessert didn't make any appreciably additional room.  For dessert, there was once again several vegan options, a couple of which I had brought.  But the piece de resistance was the vegan pumpkin pie, which my oldest daughter's sister-in-law made.  Others ate pieces of it and some claimed to prefer it.  All I know is that I ate two pieces.  It was good.

(Describing my daughters as oldest and youngest exaggerates their actual age difference, which is three and one half years.  They have a brother in between them.)

After sitting around the food for an inordinate amount of time we spent some additional time looking at digital pictures.  My oldest daughter's sister-in-law's husband takes extremely high quality digital pictures of some very great wild life.  He is to send me his Flickr url.  His 10-megapixel camera is professional grade.  He sold his motorcycle to buy a lens for it.  I truly am surprised that he is not making a living with his photography.

At about 8:30 PM, we left for the camping site so my youngest daughter, husband, and in-laws could hike the "Skyline to the Sea" trail.  At one of the day use pull off spots we discovered a map that showed the camping site was a good mile hike off the road.  By then it was 9:30 PM and well dark without a moon and overcast besides.  None of the hikers were willing to hike in the dark to a strange campsite.  So we rode back to Pacifica.  I will take them to their trail head tomorrow morning and drive back to Pacifica to pack and get on the road myself.

I'll play it by ear and not be upset at all if I decide to start my trip on Saturday instead of tomorrow.  It's far better to not leave anything critical, eat rather than throw away good food, and have fun on this trip, than to worry about any specific start time or for that matter day.  If I do end up starting tomorrow, it may be perfect timing to stop in Reno as the first stop on my Den of Inequities tour.