I’ve been having a lot of vaguely odd dreams featuring members of my family lately. Not disturbing, mind you, but just odd. For example, in one, I drove to the mall with my aunt and ran into my parents there. Shortly afterward, the mall turned into an airport and my aunt turned into my cousin (no Southern inbreeding jokes, please) and we were running from one end of said airport to the other looking for an emergency exit…

Yeah. So anyway, I know that all this has to do with guilt over the fact that I haven’t been home in almost two years. Thus, I’m starting to plan a quick trip — maybe four or five days tops — since I can’t manage more for a number of reasons right now…

Other random thoughts for a Monday afternoon:

• Why does a city as large as San Francisco have such a miserable excuse for a newspaper? I’m not expecting the LA Times here, but you’d think a city of almost 800,000 people could manage an effort on something that takes almost as long to read as the Mercury News. San Jose isn’t all THAT much bigger a city.
• Yes, I sometimes like gently reminding San Francisco that is neither the biggest nor (I’d argue) the most dominant city in the Bay Area anymore.
• I dunno about this; the world has already seen my tweeter once.
• Why no. No I didn’t post those pictures of LA this weekend. Nor answer any email. Nor will I probably end up doing so tonight.

So Mark‘s in Fresno for the weekend, and I have the whole house to myself. I have a wild weekend planned, let me tell you. I’ve already popped out to the Safeway and picked up the frozen pizza and diet grapefruit soda…

Of course — being the hermit/loner type that I still am, regardless of what you may have been lead to believe — I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like having the house all to myself once in a while, but I do already miss the little bugger, and I’ll miss him even more tonight when the bed is several degrees chillier…

That said, I’ll probably spend the weekend watching movies (there’s a big pile), hitting the thrift stores (now that my car has a new battery), catching up on email (yeah, right…), and downloading census data (because I’m a freak and that’s what I do for fun sometimes, OK?). Plus, there’s a visiting friend from Greensboro who will probably need some showing around…

I may even post those long-promised LA pictures, but don’t hold your breath…

Email quote from my mom — who gets even more spam than I do — this morning: “Everyone seems to be trying to enlarge my penis lately.”

The weekend: Target, Krispy Kreme, The Trouble with Harry, the first meat loaf I ever cooked, a little work on Bottles, Emeryville food court, squash and tomato scramble, a dead battery, avoiding the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and health insurance…

The week to come: nothing nearly so interesting as the weekend…