Packing for the trip. So far I've got:

* A laundry bag full of clothes
* Crackers (2 boxes)

I guess I'll need a road map, although the car's got a GPS. I'm thinking of going down to San Francisco first. It's funny - I've lived in California pretty much my whole life but I've never been to San Francisco. My family always went north for vacations - we'd go up to see the redwoods or maybe up to Oregon, but never south. "Birds fly south for the winter," my uncle Bill would say. "Are we birds?" I don't know what that means. My brother (now 19) says he got "locked in a redwood" on one of the family vacations. I don't know what that means either.

Nine weeks to go before my job starts in New Hampshire - I've been hired as a field director for the Viva Bread Party and their presidential candidate, Otis H. Basketry. Actually I hadn't heard of the party until I got hired, but the campaign people seem nice and they didn't mind that my degree (History of Disco - my senior thesis was "Would Thucydides Have Done The Hustle?") wasn't related to politics. Their platform calls for spending $300 billion on pastry as the solution to pretty much any problem, but clearly I'm in no position to throw stones. But I think I can do a good job - and they say there's plenty of free donuts at the campaign office!