"I didn't know you went to Caltech."

"Sure did."

"For undergraduate, right?"

"Yep."

"I would never have guessed that."

"Uh, I'm not sure how to take that. Maybe I'm a ditz?"

"No, no, I meant that in the best possible way. You have social skills."

"Heh."

"I mean, all the other people I know from Caltech are completely socially stunted."

"Yeah, Tech does that to people."

"Especially the women."

Uh, okay. What idiot travels to Hawaii and doesn't bring a bathing suit?

The ones named Kitt and Kris, of course.

For the trip out to Hawaii, I packed a bag of food. Airline lunch is provided, but Kris takes few chances with such.

For myself, I packed a raspberry yogurt, an Odwalla B Monster, an apple, and a huge salad of lettuce, cashews, cheese and dressing (on the side!). I packed Kris blueberries, a plain yogurt (brown cow!), guacamole and chips, an apple and a scone.

Contrast our bag with the bag of the family of four with a huge group of friends (putting the adult to child ratio at about 1:4) next to us, which consisted of cookies, doritos, cheetos and the token good thing, raisins.

When lunch was served, Kris pulled out his yogurt and his blueberries. After stirring his yogurt (full fat, whole milk yogurt - mmmmmmmmm!), he picked up one of the blueberries, and threw it into his yogurt. As in, he pulled back, snapped his arm down, flicked his wrist, and flung the blueberry into the yogurt at supersonic speed.

It went "blurp!"

And made a nice crater in the yogurt cup.

I turned to watch, giggling as each new blueberry disappeared into the yogurt. After a good dozen blurp!s, the collection of blueberries at the top of the yogurt started to thicken.

The next blueberry didn't embed itself into the yogurt, as the previous ones did. Instead, it bounced off the top blueberry, ricocheting off the closed window and into the row in front of us, presumably onto the lap of the 4 year old in the seat.

Clearly, growing up doesn't mean you can't keep playing with your food.

Last night, while working late, I noticed I had gunk in my right eye. My eye has been bothering me all day, being dry or slightly itchy, but I didn't think much of it.

This morning when I woke up, however, I knew something was wrong: my eye was glued shut with even more gunk than last night. I evetually managed to remove most of it from the edges of my eye, and opened it, but the missing eyelashes will be sorely missed.

A quick phone call to the doctor, an appointment with another doctor in my doctor's office, and I was on my way at lunch. I was pretty sure the problem was pink-eye, as Mike had it a few weeks back. He had pink-eye really badly, and I really wanted to avoid such luck. I dashed off to the doctor for the first appointment they had available.

I think the worst part of the doctor's office is actually the weighing in before the actual appointment. There's no way to get fully naked, go to the bathroom, not eat, anything and everything to have the lowest weight possible, so I give up and just take the keys, camera, phone and wallet out of the pockets and hop on the scale. Today's weight was a shocker: I've gained 10 pounds in the last 10 months, which is the biggest weight gain I have ever had. I weighed 105 heading into college and 106 heading out. I weighed 118 when Kris and I first started, and it took me 7 years to add another 8 pounds to that weight. Adding another 10 to that in 10 months seems a bit unusual, and has me slightly concerned.

Of course, it might be something in the water. I know 8 women due in the next 8 months (Megan, Katie, Gena, Lisa, Christina, Nichole, Jane and Heidi), what's one more?

After a few minutes in the doctor's office, the doctor came in and I described my symptoms. She listened, asked questions, looked in my ears and eyes, asked more questions, then explained to me that, yes, I had pink-eye, but most eye infections are viral, and antibiotics have no effect on viral infections. Yes, I knew this, and, darn it, I knew what was coming.

No happy pill to make everything better. Instead, five days of flushing my eyes with eyedrops every hour. Sigh.

Sometimes homeopathic, natural solutions are sucky suck. Yes, I know the antibiotics won't be effective, but I'd love a happy little pill so that my eyes stop itching and producing gunk.

Not being well known for biting my tongue, I'm struggling with not being provoked into anger at this point. I'm getting constant false accusations about actions I didn't do. I'm getting bombarded with questions as to why a task isn't done, when the time I spend explaining what I'm about to do is taking away from the time I could be using actually doing what I said I'll be doing.

The worst? "Why aren't you done with A?" "Well, you asked me to do B, C, D, E and F. So I did." "That's fine, but why aren't you done with A?" "Uh, because you told me to do B, C, D, E and F?"

I think I'm unable to deal with anyone else's obsessive behaviour, and this constant fixation with not having A done is causing everything to slip. It's getting to the point that, despite my attempts to not stress about this, their stress is spilling over into my life and seriously degrading my quality of life.

How the heck did this turn so bad so quickly? I feel myself complaining a lot now, and I really, really don't want to be that way.