My squawkbox.tv comments appear to have disappeared entirely, together with the entire squawkbox.tv website. :/

So the train trip; I wouldn't mind doing it again, despite 4 - 5+ hour delays both going and coming. What I would do differently is I would pay for the sleeper car to get a semi-private space. On the way north, my seatmate wanted to chatter the whole time, and I am not a chatter. She was also twice my size and spilt over into my seat without bothering to apologize. I was tempted at one point to ask her to reimburse me for 1/4th the cost of my trip since she took up 1/4th of my seat, but refrained. After a while, she subsided into silence since I wasn't much of a conversationalist.

My conversation specialty is the quaint observation. :) Such as when the dining car opened and the broadcasting announcer repeated several times that anyone arriving to dine without their shoes on would be sent immediately back to their seat, I remarked, "I guess it's okay to arrive without our shirts on."

The scenery is really lovely for long stretches. It would have been more perfect if we'd been able to keep on schedule, as I had looked forward to arriving in Tacoma at 7PM. The sun would still be up and the approach would have been very nice indeed. Instead, we got in at midnight whereupon I found out my poor cherubs had driven to Olympia to greet me, not realizing the Tacoma train station was actually in Tacoma. :/

I'll have to upload some of the photos Phil and I took on the return. Except my camera software is on the laptop which means I have to do some digging around to get that hooked to this monitor in order to actually view them. And yes, I did try to install the software on the XPS, but it errors out and it's too hot now to sit here to figure out how to fix it.

It was so hot yesterday I ran the air conditioner; that will make my electricity bill skyrocket. I cannot afford to live here. It often feels like drowning. If I'd known I'd be living alone for so long, I'd have gotten a much smaller and cheaper place.