I’m here. The trip wasn’t too painful at all, aside from waking up at 3:30am. There was a 45 minute flight from Buffalo to Detroit, then an hour of sitting around. The flight from Detroit to Los Angeles was about 5 hours.

Uncle Wayne picked us up from the airport, after a brief altercation with the security guard over him waiting in the no-standing area for us–Wayne can not stand being told what to do, and we narrowly avoided him being arrested and having his car impounded. I think I inherit my disdain for authority from Wayne, although mine is a more subtle variety that doesn’t result in as many traffic violations and tickets.

Of course, being Thoms, we went immediately for lunch. We had some pretty exotic Taiwanese food. After lunch we went to Wayne’s, where I met my new camera for the first time. I love it. It works just like a 10D but better and faster. The LCD screen on the back looks huge. There are no delays waiting for the camera to turn on, or for the photos to be written to the card. The other thing I love is that I can zoom in my RAW files to check focus. There was some kind of limit on how far you could zoom in on a 10D, but they’ve fixed that. The files are huge though. I can only fit 60 RAW files on my 1GB card. I’m still trying to decide if I can live with that. Here’s a little test shot of Wayne’s kitchen.

We had dinner after that. By this time I was reaching that kind of surreal, jetlagged state of not knowing how long I’d been up, or what time it really was. It was neat listening to Dad and Wayne tossing stories of their youth back and forth, recalling family history.

After dinner we came back to crash. I was feeling a bit queasy, so I tried to go to bed. Soon enough I discovered that I had a full-out case of food poisoning. I’m not sure what caused it, since no one else was lying on the bathroom floor sweating and shivering, puking into the toilet every 5 minutes. I battled through that for a couple of hours. Ocassionally I’d return to bed to try to sleep, but I’d always have to run back to the bathroom to deal with some horrendous biological need. I had some pretty nifty hallucinations though, while wrapped up in a blanket, shaking and cursing the cold, while soaking my clothes with sweat. I felt like a bulemic with a flu. After a few hours, the fever broke and I was able to sleep. I feel almost normal today.

Today we’re just relaxing. Tomorrow morning we leave sunny southern California for the snowy slopes of Mammoth. Apparently Mammoth got 24 inches of powder snow yesterday, so skiing should be good!