Finally at home, dreading over reading the 66 messages on my personal email. On my junk mail hotmail account, when I last checked there were 76 messages and counting and god only knows how many emails await me at work.

God, I love being home in San Francisco. I love the fog and the salty smell of the air. I just love being in a big city and close to an ocean.

So many things to think about. I've been writing a diary for my trip to West Virginia which I'll to post tomorrow. I'm only up to day 5 though and I have day 6 to 14 to work on. I just wish I could have blogged every day, but when on you're on vacation, it's hard to find the time. Plus, I felt so guilty logging on since each log on was a long distance call for my host. I left her some money, but I don't think it's going to be enough. I'm sure she'll email me if I need to send her more money.

The one fun thing about West Virginia which is so unPC of me is I started my mammy collection. My friend who has relatives there has one and I've been dying to start my own collection. I bought a picture from the 30's with a mammy which needs to be framed. The tag said it's from the 30's but who knows whether that's true or not. Then at a flea market on Tuesday near Lewisburg I bought a cast iron mammy. Then this girl Cindy whom we met and who lives next to the General Lewis Inn in Lewisburg and who is also a friend of our hostess, gave me her salt shaker mammy. I scored three mammies on this trip.

My friend was kidding me about me starting my racist collection. A mutual friend of ours also has a mammy collection. but since she lives in Berkeley proper, she has to hide it for fear of reprucussions we think from Berkeley PC nazis.

I wonder if I will be subject to the same PC scrutiny. I love my mammies. They're so cute.

We visited the Homestead Resort in Virginia and that was a shocker. Talk about days of the old south. The serving people were all black. The whole thing freaked me out a bit since I'd never seen anything like it, only read about it in books or seen it on TV. But Virginia is definitely a different state than West Virginia. Virginia is so much more formal and West Viriginia, more laid back, hippiesh and country hillbillyish. I'd been to Virginia before but I never noticed the formality of the state until I crossed the stateline from West Virginia.

Any way more to come. Sleep awaits after my long flight from back east. I'm very, very glad to be home.