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.

I'm flying home tonight. Blogging on the road has been difficult on vacation for two reasons. Lack of time and where I'm staying, logging on to the internet is a long distance call. It's so different from home where logging on to the internet is a local call and I can stay on as long as I like. Here I've had to worry about logging during the cheapest time rates, which means I've either had to blog after 11 pm or early in the morning before 8 am. Either time has been difficult.

I tried to write something up in Pocket Word and then tried to copy it into my blog but for whatever reason, I couldn't do it. Just as well.

It's been a strange trip.

I just read a newsletter from an astrology site that I check frequently. There was this whole thing about the eclipses and how it affected the astrologer's life. I think I've been affected too.

Things, people that I thought that were very secure in my life, I found out on this trip aren't. It's kind of like being adrift on the ocean of life without the safety of what you thought was your life raft. It's kind of what I was expecting anyway, but still it hurts deeply on some level.

I had seen the signs earlier last month so I was prepared, but still ... The only good thing is that when your old life gets stripped away like this, it just means that another new life is starting. I also have a feeling that the new life will be so much better than the old. Maybe I'll find get the support I so want and crave in my life, which right now is sadly lacking.

It's not anyone's fault either. I'm just on such a different trip that most people. It's the sad but true life of an artist I think. Only other artists understand and then only just a litttle.

Most people, maybe 99.9% of the world is so caught up in having their needs fulfilled, that this is their whole life. With me, most of my needs have been fulfilled enough, so I'm content with my life. Not that I haven't struggled, because I have and I wasn't given any break in my life either by having very rich and loving parents who gave a big fat never ending trust fund. No, my contentment has been of my own making, my own design, my own hardwork. Sometimes I think that I'm content because I have such low expectations, but then again I think, it doesn't matter. It's contentment and happiness that count.

I mean sure things could be better, they always can. But I've got life pretty well damned handled, finally after all these years, and thousands of dollars, thousands of books, thousands of hours in therapy, seminars and classes, and thousands of bucketfuls of tears.

But it's this contentment with my life, that has allowed me the freedom to pursue my creativity, my art and now maybe finally work on it when I'm not working. It's been a long and difficult road to finding my true art, but I think writing may be it. At least I've made the decision at this point, that I'm never going to find out if writing is my true art unless I devote alot of time and energy to it.

It's like when I wanted run marathons. I devoted alot of time and energy into my running and I ran three New York City marathons before I decided that marathoning and long distance running wasn't my thing. But at least I had run three marathons to confirm my decision.

I need to do the same with my writing. I'm in year 4 of my writing quest and I've been pursuing it halfheartedly. I read somewhere that it takes five years for an artist to develop their style, their voice. I still have another year and a half to go, but this time I want to write with purpose and much more seriously than I've done it in the past.

When I was doing the climbing the corporate ladder thing, it took my five years to almost double my salary and responsibility level. And at the end of five years, I looked at my life and said being a corporate freak wasn't it.

I have a history of pursuing what I want and going for it in five years and being successful and finding out whether I want it or not. I need to do the same with writing. Except with my writing, I kind of think this is it. At least I hope it is. I don't know what I would do if writing didn't pan out. I'm sure there's something out there for me, I just don't what it is yet.

So it's writing for me until I decide that writing isn't it. My mission starts officially on July 20. I'm looking forward to what my new life will bring.

Trying to blog on a hot summer July night in West Viriginia. The mosquitos are eating me alive and moths are flying everywhere.

I'll try to review my trip from Day 1.

The airport shuttle arrives at my friend's house in Oakland at 4:30 am. Our flight did not leave till 7 am from San Francisco, but we didn't know what to expect with all the post 9/11 security.

The ride to SFO at that time of the morning only took at half an hour so we got there at around 5 am. To my surprise, we saw people doing curbside check in, which I thought was not allowed anymore. There were very few people in line. We looked inside and the line at the American Airlines counter was 100 people deep. There was an airline person there and we asked him where we needed to go to check in. He told us we should do curbside check in. Why more people weren't doing that is a mystery to me. You have to tip the guy about a couple of dollars per bag, but it was such a small price to pay to not have to wait in that very long line.

San Francisco is one of the few airports where there are no federal screeners. After all the mishaps with the private screeners, I wasn't sure if I felt very comfortable being checked in by non-federal screeners but what can you do.

The airport security at SFO is now set up like JFK and LaGuardia. If you don't have a ticket, you can't get to the gates. The screening process wasn't too bad, except that if you have a laptop, you have to take it out of your bag. A few people were getting extra screening with the security wand but it was hard to tell why they were getting picked out of line.

After awhile, I wanted to get wanded, just to see what the full security screening was like. But when my friend got wanded in Chicago, I quickly walked away, not wanting security to know that we were together.

The flight itself was uneventful. We had a 1.5 hour layover in Chicago and had fun trying to figure out how to get from the American Airlines terminal to the United Airlines terminal.

One thing I did notice was the presence of the oh so trendy turquoise jewerly that was worn by the majority of the women at SFO. At Chicago, I saw one teenager wearing something turquoise. Don't women in Chicago and the rest of the country read fashion mags? I mean, I even had my oh so trendy turquoise bracelet on and I'm not trendy at all.

The United Airlines plane we took to West Virginia was one of those small hopper airlines, that seated less than 30 people maybe, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the flight to Charleston WVA was only an hour.

The airport at Charleston is very small and the car rental places are right where you pick up your luggage. We were going to rent a compact car but somehow the lure of a mini SUV seemed a more appropriate vehicle for driving around in the country. The car rental guy told it was only going to be $3 more a day and so we rented a Chevy Tracker, which is kind of like a low rent Toyota Rav4. The engine is good but not that powerful. My Golf would leave the Tracker in the dust in a race, but for a rental car it's great. Plus we have 4 wheel drive should we ever need it.

We arrived at around 5 pm and my friend decided that we needed to go to one of those tourist traps to eat. We stopped at this eating place with shops called Tamarack. There were signs for it everywhere on the freeway.
The menu feature a more upscale version of WVA food and even had fried green tomotoes and bacon on the menu. I settled for a barbeque pork sandwich, which my native WVA friend said wasn't very authentic since the meat wasn't shredded enough.

The restaurant is surrounded by these shops which are supposed to represent the best of WVA arts and crafts. We decided to go back there on the way back to the airport when we fly home if we needed last minute gifts. I'm kind of bummed I didn't have the fried green tomatoes but we'll end up going back I think.

The 'skeeters are eating me alive now. More tomorrow.

Blogging from south eastern West Virginia, on a 100 acre farm belonging to my friend's sister. I can hear the sounds of bull frogs croaking in the stagnant pond nearby built by the beavers who tried to flood her out. Alas, the beavers are gone; it's kill or be killed here in the Appalachian mountains.

The farm, called the Rockdale Farm, lies at the end of a road. If I lived here, I would have a big barking dog and a shotgun so I could shoot any strangers who come on my property. If you love the silence of the country, this the place to be, but for me the isolation is hard to bear.

To get to town takes about 45 minutes on windy country road where deer, bunny rabbits, racoons and other animals dart in your path. Sometimes the road is paved and sometimes it's not. If you don't know where you're going, it would be easy to get freaked out and think you were lost.

This is beautiful country, unspoiled by industry, only because the windy roads make it impossible or any industry to sprout. Not that the state isn't trying. Everywhere you go, you see four colour brochures that sell West Virginia as the last great wilderness left in America. Perhaps they are right. You'd have to really want to live here to bear the isolation and the monotony of the trees and forests.

The people here are very friendly, which I don't find that surprising. I grew up in the country and most country folk are friendly on a one on one basis. My friend tells me it's the second to last poorest state in the nation; Mississippi being the poorest. Tourism is the only industry that West Virginia has and the country people know that.

In a general store near Droop Mountain, I had a fun flirtation with a guy whose car had Alberta license plates. He had a mountain bike attached to his car. There's a 76 mile river trail here that you can bike called the Greenbriar Trail. The trail runs along a river that you can swim in. We biked six miles of it on July 4th and swam in its muddy waters and watched lightning spikes on the ridge right in front of us.

Droop Mountain is the site of some civil war battle. We still haven't visited the site but we pass it on the way to my friend's parents' 150 acre farm which lies on the other side of Droop mountain.

Her mom says the weather is better on the top of mountain, especially in the winter time because the cold winter snow air settles down to the bottom of the valley. But when there are lightning storms, they're the first ones to get a bolt since there is nothing else on the mountain to hit.

We went to a luncheon today with authentic west virginia food. Corn pone, sugar cured ham, sweetened ice tea, baked beans, macaroni salad with mayo but no eggs, and cut tomoatoes from the garden. The ham was salty and fried to death but so delicious. Corn pone is nothing but a moister corn bread but it's what they eat here so it's native cuisine.

I had grits for the first time a couple of days ago. It tasted like a grainer version of my mother's lumpy cream of wheat. But again like the corn pone, it's authentic native cuisine.

There's so much more to write but technology seems so strange here in the Appalachian mountains. It almost feels sinful to be typing away on little baby laptop with pocket explorer that can't read javascript. Somewhere a West Virginian is having a laugh at my predicament. It's so typical of the state.