Apart from my soccer foibles, the four day July 4th weekend was a good one. As stated previously, it began with a late night trek down the 5 to Los Angeles. V didn't get home from work until 7:45pm on Friday night, by which time i had packed, cleaned the house a little, and finished Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. We left around 8:40pm, stopping briefly in Gilroy to get dinner. Veronica and i encountered traffic on the narrow and dark 152 and again around Kettleman City, but arrived in the standard six hours. We spent the time listening to Howard Stern on Sirius. It's perfect for the SF to LA drive, as you get to hear a complete show. This one featured some great riffing on conservative blowhard Debbie Schlussel's hysterical condemnation of Superman Returns ... "Superman doesn't have muscles! Superman's gay!". As Howard cleverly noted, she's desperate to garner the kind of attention nutjob Ann Coulter does. But she'll need to start insulting real people to get it.

After a rather depressing morning and early afternoon watching the World Cup, and an SMFA friendly in which Matthew and England wiped the floor with my feeble U.S. team (although the result was more a testament to my atrophying Winning Eleven skills than my lackluster team), Dionne, Matthew, Veronica, and i headed over to the mall for a food court lunch and a bit of shopping for the girls. We returned and lounged for a bit more, watching the BJM/Dandy Warhols documentary Dig! (which seemed to grate on Matthew and Veronica, although i maintain that Anton Newcombe has a tortured, tragic genius about him) and getting in some head-to-head Guitar Hero battles. We then drove off to City Walk to catch the 10:30pm showing of Superman Returns, perhaps spurred on by Schlussel's rantings. We braved the crowds and secured seats in the balcony, then grabbed a dinner of hot dogs and nachos from the convenience stand. As for the film, i was mostly unimpressed. It was very uneven, dragging for long periods. You may want to stop reading here if you're worried about spoilers, because i'm about to cut loose. As far as i'm concerned, the film was essentially a remake of the 1978 original. Which is all the more disconcerting for me, because as i understood it this was supposed to be a NEW Superman story. This similarity includes the Lex Luthor/Ms. Teschmacher relationship, replaced here with Parker Posey's Kitty Kowalski but still using her as a decoy to distract Superman, her falling for the handsome superhero, and finally undoing Lex's plans because of her affection for the hero and her recognition of Luthor's insanity. The plot is also basically the same, focusing on a Luthor plot to create and dominate real estate. However, as Roger Ebert put it the magic of the original is gone. We see people fly all the time in the movies these days, so Superman had better do something truly magical to grab our attention. The plodding dialog didn't help, with Superman/block of wood Brandon Routh suffering through some really awful exchanges. Oh well. Bryan Singer may have escaped the X-Men: The Last Stand travesty, but Superman Returns isn't all that better.

Veronica and i again collapsed upon finding the bed kindly provided by Matthew and Dionne. This time i got to sleep in without the wake up call of the World Cup, and accordingly slumbered until almost 1pm. We had a nice outside lunch of home-cooked rotisserie chicken and couscous, then bid farewell to our friends and drove across L.A. to Whittier and Veronica's aunt, uncle, cousins, and grandmother. The rest of the evening was spent playing with their four chihuahuas, with their leader Shadow taking a liking to me and establishing himself on my chest.

After more doggie time on Monday morning and early afternoon, and a few games of Mario Superstar Baseball against Austen (in which i somehow emerged victorious, first 3-1 then 17-1), we surveyed Veronica's families gorgeous backyard, then hit the road to head back north. Another six hour drive centering on Howard Stern, capped off by hearing the incredible story of Artie's drug-fueled exit from Mad TV just as we pulled into our house at 11:30pm. Tara, who'd been dog-sat by the gracious Naomi over the weekend, had been by herself since noon when Naomi left for a job interview, was in raptures as the door opened and mommy and daddy strolled in. Naomi had gone so far as to vacuum and tidy ... awesome.

I awoke around 10am on the morning of the fourth, and immediately switched into domestic mode. I watered the lawn, then drove to Whole Foods to get corn and veggies for the afternoon's barbecue at my parents' house in Fremont. Veronica and i then spent an hour or so readying the corn on the cob for grilling, and making twelve skewers of peppers, mushrooms, onions, and zucchini for similar treatment. We headed over around 2:30pm, with Tara tagging along so she wouldn't be alone in the house for another whole day. This may have been the best day of her life. After realizing that she wasn't being taken to the vet that is a few blocks from my parents, she spent her first half hour in Fremont charging around the house and backyard, enthusiastically exploring her new domain. Tara then resumed her usual activity of begging for food, encouraged by the throng of new faces and abundance of tasty things. Veronica and i meanwhile spent the afternoon talking to my sister and Jeff, my aunt, uncle and cousin, Betty and Ted, my parents' friends the Bingles and my mom's Mission math colleague, and my parents. Apart from the dog, a highlight of the afternoon was looking through old photo albums with Veronica, Hilary, and Jeff, with my sister spitting out quips for every one of my adolescent foibles. Come 7:30pm the cats had done their usual number on my sinuses, so we brought doggie home. I spent the rest of the evening sneezing and catching a particularly good night on cable, watching favorites the Big Lebowski and Heathers.

Now it's back to work, with the rest of my summer slated for writing papers. And going to review grants in Virginia for the Department of Defense. And flying to Hawaii for the annual SMI meeting. And perhaps a trip to North Carolina. What happened to the summers of old, swimming for four hours a day and playing basketball until 8pm? They've fallen by the wayside of nostalgia, increasingly blurry like a soft photographic haze and the mists of memory.