The end of the tour

Our last day was spent in Portsmouth, NH. We spent the day at Strawbery Banke. It's a Colonial settlement with homes dating back to the 1700 and 1800's. At some point, most of them had been turned into duplexes and rentals. They were about to be torn down during urban renewal plans in the 1950's, but were saved and turned into this museum. The most interesting home retained one half of the duplex as it was in the 50's and the other half was restored to the way it had been in the 1800's when it was a store. The whole deal was similar to the Folkemuseum outside of Oslo.

From there, Heidi dropped me off at my sister's house, where I stayed through Memorial Day with my adorable niece and nephew. Here's my niece running across the bridge at the park, which she did about 100 times and when it was time to leave, she threw a fit because, I presume, she wanted to do it 100 more times. The other main activity of the weekend was reading Star Wars books to my 5 year-old nephew. He's already totally into Star Wars and told me several times that Luke Skywalker is his favorite Jedi. When I babysat on Monday, we acted out a light saber fight with him as Luke and me as Darth Vader. If I did Darth Vader's breathing wrong, he corrected me. When that got old, we did a blaster fight--he was Han Solo and I was a Storm Trooper. Good times!

I've been back in the city for a few days now and I'm trying to keep busy. Tuesday, I attempted to get caught up on Lost and I was unsuccessful, so no one tell me what happened in tonight's finale! Wednesday I saw the Indiana Jones movie finally, and then went to see a B'way show. Both were okay.

Today I went to the NY Transit museum in downtown Brooklyn, then made the schlep over to Williamsburg to try a restuarant that Heidi has had on her radar for weeks. When we arrived, we were told that they closed between 3:00 and 5:30, and we got there at 3:20! I had to rush back home because I was hosting book club tonight. I had cooking and cleaning to do and all of it was done at the last minute, but luckily, Leolani was here to help me.

Tomorrow is my last day of vacation. I know this sounds terrible, but I am dreading going back to work on Monday! Usually after three weeks off, I am really happy to get back to real life. But right now, real life is not good. And by real life, I mean work stuff. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the next two months. Seriously. Just thinking about it makes me depressed.