Home from the west

Well, we're back from California.

I speculated on whether the retreat center would be still standing after my boys stormed it, and yes it is.

I however, am not.

It seems a bug of some sort swept through town, smiting both Matthew and me. He caught it Monday, puking all over himself after we went to the beach just north (I think) of San Pedro, and he's had diarrhea ever since.

Tuesday night, Jenny's aunt from Encino took us to Santa Monica and to a Mexican restaurant, Mariasol, that sits on a pier. They bill themselves as the closest to the sunset, which we could have seen if the waiter had remembered to put our order in and we hadn't waited a half hour or so for our appetizers alone. Anyway, after missing the sunset (it was a nice view anyway), we were driving home when my tummy start feeling funny. I asked Aunt Criss to pull over, and I got out, walked around, paid $2.50 for a Sprite and felt better. I got back in the car, Criss got back on the freeway, and about 20 minutes later, my tummy was back at it. As she was pulling off, I opened my mouth to ask her to pull over again, but what came out was not words, if you catch my drift. It was carnitas, shredded and half-digested. All over her car; all over me. Blaow.

We got home to the convent at 10 PM and of course it was all locked up, mercifully, Sr. Mary Louise had left us a note saying we could page her and she would let us in, which we did. And then I crawled into bed and woke up feeling 100% better.

Well, no, actually I went in, collapsed on the bathroom floor, and spent the next 6 hours being "prolificly ill," to euphemize the situation.

Wednesday morning, Jenny got on the phone to try to postpone our flights to give me some recovery time, and we found out that it would cost us over $1,000 to get on the same flights the next day. So at 10 AM, we loaded up the Carmelite's van and Jenny's sister drove us to the airport. Our flights went fairly well, but except for some apple slices in the morning I didn't eat a thing the whole day for fear of puking in my seat. Mama-Lu was a saint and a soldier, doing most of the heavy lifting so I could get by with just pushing the stroller around the airports.

So here I am, still sick, home an extra day from work. (I'm still trying to justify in my head how sitting at a computer blogging is different from sitting at a computer approving purchase orders and doing portfolio reviews.)

Up to the moment when I got violently and debilitatingly ill, the trip had gone marvelously wonderfully. The St. Joseph's Retreat Center is absolutely beautiful.