Here's a great way to start a vacation: after 12 hours of driving, run your girlfriend's parents' car into the back of your girlfriend's grandmother's car. It gets even better when said girlfriend begins to experience neck and back pain immediately after said collision.

Fortunately, it was a very low-speed collision, and there was no actual damage to either car or to girlfriend. And after that, the vacation didn't have anywhere to go but up! (Silver lining found. Regular readers yawn, unsurprised.)

In the end, despite some moderate sunburn, it was a very relaxing and enjoyable vacation, complete with seafood buffet, and mini-golf on a course that was extremely well-landscaped, if slightly uninspired in terms of hole design.

On the first full day at the beach, we noticed that the ocean in North Carolina is very clear, unlike the Jersey shore ocean that I'm used to. We noticed this because we didn't have to lift our legs up very far before we could see them through the water. Here is a diagram:

  0
  +--
~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  |       o< (fish)
  | 

As a valuable public service, I present the following method for determining how clear the ocean is. Simply lift one of your legs, as pictured above, until you can see it through the water. Then measure the angle between your legs, and consult the following chart:

• 0�: crystal-clear

• 15�: very clear

• 45�: clear

• 60�: murky

• 90�: very murky

• 180�: you are in a tar pit.

Going on a family vacation with someone else's family was... less weird than I thought it'd be. Normally, around other people's families, I play the peacekeeper, Mahatma freaking Gandhi, uttering the knee-jerk "I'll carry that" or "I'm not really hungry" in a desperate attempt to defuse any tension that comes up, for fear that I'll have to witness an embarrassing family argument, the kind where all you can do is just sit there and look uncomfortable and pretend you're not listening. With Jenn's family, though, I've reached the point where I can make a wisecrack or even help them taunt Jenn, if the stakes are low enough. Plus they don't fight much. This is a good thing, and bodes well for the future. I like Jenn's family.

Jenn is now house-sitting for her landlady, a high-ranking CMU administrator. This is a bonus for me. For one thing, it is a nice house. It has an Ethernet connection, like Jenn's apartment, but attached to a computer fast enough to keep up with the connection; it has an N64 with fun games; it has a Tivo, for frame-by-frame TV fun-ness; it has free laundry. An interesting side effect is that Jenn and I can be in different rooms from each other - different floors, even! - potentially doing completely different things from each other. After three years of college living, it's a strange feeling to be in the same domicile as someone and yet not be able to see them at all times. It's kind of a nice feeling, strangely, which leads me to conclude that I'm increasingly looking forward to becoming an actual real-life adult.