red hot mamma: Good times on the West Coast

A couple weeks ago, I got to spend some quality time with my favorite person, Amanda, in her adopted hometown of San Francisco. I get regular fare updates from kayak, so when I saw a round trip Austin-SFO ticket for $140, I jumped on it. Of course, I had to time my trip with the NNAF staff's West Coast fundraising tour and Amanda and I threw a kickass brunch to raise money and awareness for the Network. Unfortunately the whole thing coincided with a complete breakdown of my body, the culmination of weeks of stress and unhealthy habits. Congestion and flying don't mix, especially when your plane has to circle for awhile at that awful altitude where your ears are completely pressurized. So for the entire five days I had a ringing in my ears, stuffiness and intense pain. Good times! The morning of the brunch, when we had so much cleaning and cooking to do, I woke up and the pain on the left side of my head was so bad, I couldn't open my mouth more than an inch or two. No blow job face for me! Consuming vast quantities of mimosas helped, as did a muscle relaxer I took after I'd already done the fundraising pitch.

Not much occurred on this trip and the weather was pretty much like this the whole time:

Muggy, rainy, cold and wet at night. I didn't mind because if it had been beautiful out, I would have felt obligated to actually do stuff. Grey and wet was just fine with me. Also, my DSLR is acting up and needs to go in for repairs most likely, so if I was going to be stuck with nothing more than an iphone and a piece of shit point and shoot, I was glad I couldn't get out much to take photos.

Most of my time was spent getting as much friend face time in as possible. Fortunately most of my favorite people in the world all came together for the brunch. I finally got to introduce Amanda to Lynne, Sheila and Jill. Having those four powerful women in the same room with the lovely Elina, badasses Steph and Megan and all the other fantastic people who came to the brunch made up for whatever pain I was feeling. Even though most of it was a haze, I felt great having all those people around me. Unfortunately I was too out of it to remember that I had a camera. So zero pictures, which really bums me out.

The only brunch-related photo - tulips the day after

On Monday, the twitterverse was abuzz with talk of Star Wars Day, May the Fourth be with you! Uhm, how can we NOT go to Lucasarts HQ and take photos?

Amanda and her handsome roommate Earl

Yeah, so this photo is tiny. Whatevs.

Lightsaber!

Amanda relives childhood memories

The rest of my time was spent in the East Bay. I also got to spend time with Amanda's precocious and adorable nephew and niece in Alameda. Then we had a super-affordable and yummy sushi dinner in Oakland with Lynne. (Seriously - we got tons of sushi, tempura, a bottle of saki and beer for under $50. Hello!) The next day we BARTed out to Oakland again for lunch with Jill. Then it was back across the bay for the requisite shopping trip to H&M and that eve I had a glass of wine with Sheila and margaritas with Dan & Elina.

I could not have asked for a more perfect vacation - good times with good friends and not much else. On the last night, I blew any chance I might have had at feeling semi-normal for the trip home by dancing my ass off with Earl, Amanda and Gavin. I'd like to thank the makers of pseudoephedrine-free Walgreen's brand cold medicine and tequila for giving me the energy to party it up just a wee bit. I caught all of 45 minutes of nap time before my 6am flight home. Lesson learned: just sleep in and catch the next flight out. Work ain't gonna happen when you don't get any sleep the night before anyway!

Thanks, Amanda for being the hostesss with the mostest and for all the great time talking. I need to move out west. Can someone please find me a job so that can happen? K. Thx.