It's weird to be back at work after two weeks of vacation. The traffic on 19th Ave and South 280 was slow as usual. My office looked the same and when I asked the receptionist if anything had happened while I was away, she said "nothing important".

I didn't listen to my usual radio shows while on vacation, so it's kind of odd to hear Jim Rome ranting about something like he's doing now. Somehow The Jungle and vacation in West Virginia weren't very compatible. The house I was staying at was so far away that I couldn't get good radio reception anyway. And the time zone thing threw me off since the two national radio shows I listen to are West Coast based and instead of listening to them at my regular time, I had to wait three hours.

I did the usual office thing and distributed gifts to the few choice people in my office, the receptionist since my office is near that area and the only other person in my group. Thank god there's only two of us and I didn't have to worry about buying a whole bunch of stuff. Then there's the present for "the kitchen", which is usually food. You put the food in the kitchen and magically it disappears. Who eats is is unknown, but in any office news of food in the kitchen travels fast.

For my kitchen gift, I bought some fudge made in West Viriginia and since I didn't buy any for myself, I had to eat a piece. It was very good. Authentic too since I bought some homemade fudge at John Henry Days in Talcott, West Virginia on Saturday July 13.

I stepped on the scale this morning and I gained the four pounds I lost in June, so now I have to go back on my strict eating plan to get back to the weight I was when I left. I'm also doing alot of cleansing remedies since I did nothing but chow on pork in all its glorious forms in West Virginia. From fatty tasty bacon, to pork sausage, sugar cured ham, countless numbers of shredded barbeque pork sandwiches, pork everything actually. Our hostess is also a fabulous baker and so of course we sampled all her cakes, corn pone, biscuits, and her homemade truffles.

I was so off my new kosher/levital diet, but I rationalized it by telling myself I was on vacation and it's not like I eat food like this all the time, if hardly ever. I think I'm going off meat until August just to get the pork and pork fat out of my already clogged arteries.

I drank my usual lemonade cleansing drink yesterday and had the worst headache. It freaked me out. Did I really eat that many toxins while on vacation? But it's so much fun to eat like a pig on vacation! It's like a free pass into the world of food and I never stick to my strict eating plan while far away from home. It's way too hard! I'm not a food nazi either and I don't ever want to force my weird way of eating on anyone, except my next husband. I'm hoping I marry a food freak like myself so I don't feel so strange about my odd food habits or guilty either.

At least it's warm where my office is. Our last few days in West Virginia were drizzly and raining and quite cold. Where the usual summer vacation weather is, god only knows. It wasn't in West Virginia. There were quite a few very muggy days, but not as many as I was told I should have had. Oh well. I hate muggy hot weather anyway. Maybe I brought the cold foggy weather from SF with me.

A two week vacation is great. It's just weird to be back in one's normal life when it's over.

I watched Witchblade tonight and OH MY GOD, there was the cutest looking guy on the show. He's supposed to be Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, who Christ condemned on his way to Golgatha. Man, the actor they picked to play him was soooo cute. I wonder if every woman watching the show thought the same thing. He was beautiful like the beautiful elf man in The Lord of the Rings. He was like the love god himself Jim Morrison from the Doors only modern.

And of course, he was the bad guy, a demon, who killed and maimed without a conscience. But still, god was he cute. I taped the episode and had to watch it again because Mr. Demon was so darn handsome. It just reinforces my theory that the bad boys for me are often the major hotties in my life.

And it was love at first sight, like how every girl fantasizes, meeting some guy in some weird place like at a restaurant bathroom, and you both stand there and stare into each others' eyes, where you're half expecting the earth to move. Then of course, they make Mr. Demon, such a guy-guy and he drives a motorcycle, but he's into art and he puts the seat down in the toilet. Now if the guy did yoga, he'd be a dream come true.

I don't believe in first love myself, but it's my total fantasy that I meet a guy at some weird place and we stare into each other eyes and the next thing you know, you're married. I thought I had a love at first sight experience in February in my screenwriting class with my beautiful marina hottie boy, but the only eyes that were sparking were mine. His were turned away and surveying all the available chicks in the room, not including me. Ah well. He was a beautiful man and there's nothing like have a pretty boy in your class that you can stare at if class is boring. So he was good at least for that.

I have no idea why I thought this particular actor playing demon boy was so attractive either. But god, he sure was and he also had a great voice. His character was also plain speaking which I liked. When the witchblade chick told demon boy she had fallen in love with him, he replied that he had fallen in love with her too. God, what a totaly fantasy! An honest man. The only guy who ever admitted to me what he really felt was Brian and I think that confession came not of his own volition, but out of a need to explain our relationship, which of course was incredibly unexplainable. When the witchblade chick said to Mr Demon guy that she'll never get used to watching him leave, he turns around and says, you won't have to, ever. Well the guy has been wandering around since the days of Christ, so you'd think he'd have picked up a few tips on what to say to a woman to make her happy and how to treat a woman. He's practiced, that's all.

Then of course to complete the total chick fantasy, Mr. Demon says at the end when he's dying that the witchblade chick is the only woman he's ever loved. Nothing like a guy dying in your arms and saying you're the only he's ever loved, which of course is true because now the guy is dead. How convenient.

Mr Demon guy reminded me of Anne Rice's The Mummy. Of course, you'd want a guy who's been wandering around this earth for centuries. Think of how many sex tricks the guy knows and how many positions. I'm bad, I know.

I wish I could fall in love at first sight but I never have. I don't know if it's because I don't believe in it or it's just never happened. I've never met a guy who had eyes I wanted to stare in for a very long period of time. Except there was this one guy at some outlet store near Jackson Square park a very long time ago. I couldn't take my eyes off him and he couldn't take his eyes off of me. I ran out of the store blushing and embarrassed about doing that, but I had the distinct feeling that the guy might have "the one" and I passed it up. But then again I was married at the time and it didn't make sense that there could be two "the ones" and I wasn't willing to think that maybe I had married someone who wasn't "the one." That would have been way to depressing. And I never ran into him again and I put the whole episdoe down to me salivating over some beautiful man in a store.

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.