In the immortal words of Sam Gamgee, "Well, I'm back." (those words had better end this winter's Return of the King or i'm gonna be pissed).

I'm writing from my mom's G4 in Fremont, California, where we've been the last few days after our return from Boston. Our return trip was much less eventful than our epic week-long drive there two years ago. But that's to be expected as this time we had movers packing, loading, and moving all our possessions. Thursday evening was our last night in Boston. Veronica's former New Balance coworkers took her out to the Common Ground. I attended for a few hours before i felt the urge to walk the couple of blocks home and organize things for the movers. I disassembled our entertainment center and Veronica's eMac and packed clothes for my luggage until midnight, when Veronica returned from her merrymaking. I collapsed at 2am but she stayed up the entire night packing and cleaning. The next morning i left for my last day at the CMIR, sporting an LBMI@CMIR T-shirt given to me by my labmates, while Veronica waited for the movers. They arrived around 9:30 and proceeded to impress her with feats of strength, such as carrying 75 pound boxes of CDs three at a time. My last day at work was hurried, but included a nice CMIR pizza party featuring a going-away cake and a "You're the greatest!" balloon.

By 3:30pm our apartment looked like the picture above, and Veronica and her mom Arlene were in the last stages of cleaning. We grabbed a final burger at Sunset Grill before leaving Massachusetts for good and heading down to Rhode Island. Saturday was spent with Rob and Roo in Providence. We had a nice shopping stint in Warwick looking for Gameboy Advance games (F-Zero, Super Dodge Ball, and Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo for Rob, SPF2T, Wario Ware, and Chu Chu Rocket for Veronica), spent a few last hours with Olive, and then had a nice dinner at Downcity before checking out the Providence Water Fire. Basically a big street festival centering around a hundred or so fires burning in urns on the Providence River, it was a good time nonetheless.

Sunday (yes, i'm only up to Sunday) we hooked up with Arlene, Alan, and baby Ana (the triple A crew) and headed to Wickford RI for the annual Wickford art festival. Another big street festival, featuring booth upon booth of art for sale. Alan and Arlene made a few purchases, but i was content to follow them around with an Italian sausage or clam cake in hand. Ana was having a hard time waking up and was therefore quite grumpy for most of the afternoon. Around 4pm we headed to Narragansett to Mary Jane and Donnie's house (Alan's sister and brother-in-law, keep up), where we whiled away the evening watching The Matrix on Donnie's sweet surround sound system.

Monday we had a final meal with AAA at the Modern Diner in Providence before heading to T.F. Green Airport and leaving the East Coast altogether. We arrived exhausted in San Jose at 10:10 PST and met my mom. After sleeping in until a nice late 8:30 Tuesday morning (damn time change), we began our search for housing. We've seen several nice condos in Burlingame and Redwood City over the last few days, but Veronica and i are pretty much decided that we'd like to rent a house. A little more space, a yard, and more distance from your neighbors ... oh yeah, that's where it's at. We're heading to a Burlingame realtor tomorrow to try to improve our search methods, which currently center around Craigslist.

It's very strange to be back in California for good. However much i've missed being here, i do miss the CMIR, the Charles River, and Allston already. I'll close this rambling summary of our last days in Massachusetts and our first ones back in the Bay Area by giving a big thanks to all the people who made my time in the East Coast the wonderful experience it was: Rob, Rudha, Becca, Mike D, Vasilis, Ralph, Doreen, Andreas, Giannis, Anabela, Jorge, Nancy, Dianne, and all the others i'm too tired to keep typing out.