Went out for lunch with my mom, brother, step-father, and step-sister today. We took the ferry over to San Diego and walked 600 miles or so to this mexican restaurant my brother knew.
On the ferry, they have signs telling us to have our IDs out and bags open for inspection. Not that they actually did (which was lucky, since I happened to not have my ID on me), but still freaky.
The restaurant was interesting - very artsy. Not what you'd associate with a mexican restaurant in a questionable part of town. Pokez, for any San Diegans out there. They had decent food - a lot of vegetarian/vegan stuff.
I'm not sure what to think about this whole step-family thing. It's strange - the two females (one 16, and the other 23 or 24) are like supermodels or something. And they're all normal people with a grasp of fashion and so on. The type who make my inferiority complex kick in :P She seemed nice enough, though. She and my brother really hit it off, but that isn't the least bit surprising. He hits it off with everyone.
It's odd, really. Up through middle school, he was a bigger dweeb than me. Then he hits high school, and suddenly he's Mr. Popular. He has a gaggle of girls who follow him around. Whenever we go anywhere, he runs into a bunch of people that he knows.
Literally anywhere. We're in the middle of downtown London, and he runs into some girl he knows from church.
Sitting in the restaurant, he saw two people, including one from Santa Cruz (he's at UCSC).
Anyways, we came back across on the fascist ferry, and checked out an art gallery in the little touristy shopping center. They had a display of Dr. Seuss art, including some really cool stuff - obviously Dr. Seuss style, but just off enough from his usual to seem odd.
After that, we went to Mootown (an excellent ice cream shop, run by my "father" (he played the king in The King and I, and I was one of his 30 million kids)). It often has lines extending down the block. Luckily, everyone was apparently still stuffed from Thanksgiving, and there was no wait at all. I got my usual - tiramisu flavor - with m&m's. We walked down to the beach as we ate (my brother saw 2 other people he knew), and then back around past L. Frank Baum's (the guy who wrote The Wizard of Oz - the emerald city was based on the
Hotel Del Coronado, this huge old hotel).
Walking back to the car, we ran into a friend of the family - the mother of one of the guys in my class, who I'd been friends with since we were little kids. My mom introduced her husband and her daughter (not step-daughter, daughter. This bothers me a bit. She's *my* mom, not some stranger's who she didn't know before 2 years ago). I have a feeling this person may not have even known that my parents were divorced, let alone that my mom had remarried. I'm pondering calling her tomorrow to apologize, since it was obviously an awkward situation for her.
It's still difficult to adjust. It doesn't seem right that my mom isn't here, even though she's been gone for over a year. Perhaps if I were living at home, experiencing it every day, it would be easier to accept.
It's just one more of those little things (ok, I guess it's a rather big thing) that are out of place that make coming home so weird, like the doors at the school being painted a different color, or the new apartment buildings in the Hanson's front yard, or the ice cream shop that went out of business, or the new extension to the convention center, or the military humvees guarding the bridge. Or any other of the numerous little things that have shifted since I was last here, standing out sharply against the majority of things which are exactly the same.