I'm home in Los Gatos with my parents for Labor Day weekend. I came down yesterday, taking BART to Fremont, and then a bus from the BART station to the Caltrain station in downtown San José, where my dad picked me up and drove me back to Los Gatos. Total time was about two and a half hours, which is at least an hour longer than the trip by car. The bus from Fremont honors my AC Transit (Alameda County) bus pass, which is nice because it makes the second half of the trip free, but I still find it pathetic that BART hasn't been extended to San José already.

On the matter of pathetic things, I am disgusted that no effort was made to evacuate people who didn't own cars from New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit, even though there was several days warning. This is supposed to be a developed country. It's not like we lack the resources or infrastructure.

Today was a pretty relaxing day. My dad took me to the parking lot at West Valley College and I practiced driving stick shift in our old yellow Volvo. I felt like I was learning how to drive for the first time but it was a lot more intuitive than the first time I tried driving a manual. At this point I am at the "Fly yes, land no" stage (line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"). I also ate a lot of watermelon for lunch because my mom bought a huge cheap watermelon and there are only three people in the house to eat it. I talked to Tzu-Huan on the phone (I hadn't talked to him in two years, since I was in Japan and then he was in the UK). And I made homemade whole wheat bread with my mom, something I wish I had been able to do in Japan, but there weren't any ovens there. The bread turned out just as good as I had remembered it to be.