Last day in San Jose, for now

...and that makes me sad, because I see too little of Alex and Sigrid. Driving here from Washington has made me more conscious of how many miles separate us.

But the rest of the story gets better. We put in most of the day at their future new home, and we have a lot to show for it: - just compare this photo with the one in my first post from here, shot a week ago:

• We pulled up the rest of the weeds, and Alex mowed the lawn (a large one, most of it not visible in the photo) with the new mower he had bought yesterday.
• We cut back the runaway bougainvillea - in this photo Alex is extricating the remnants from the wires that come into the house and Sigrid is cleaning up the debris. We're all full of holes from the plant's long thorns..
• We ripped down the unsightly decayed metal awning from the front patio (right side of the photo), improving the way the place looks and brightening the front room. The second photo shows the corpus delicti on its way to a temporary resting place in the back yard.

For brunch we went to Café San Jose near their new house. Tonight's farewell dinner was at the Fish Market, one of a small California chain. The food was great in both places, but oddly, in both places we had trainee waiters with a certain amount of uncertainty in answering our questions and errors in serving (or forgetting) the food we had requested. We laughed the mishaps off for the most part, but it bothered me that at the Fish Market the trainer/waiter also tried to enlist us as allies in making the trainee suffer for his errors.

Tomorrow I hit the road for the three-day trip to Scottsbluff. Last night I couldn't help but remember the repeated descriptions in the Cantar de Myo Cid (Poem of the Cid) of the grief of parting from one's family, como la uña de la carne, like the nail from the flesh. I hope some of this sadness dissipates when I'm on the road again.