I’ve exhausted myself over the last 10 days. Between Saturday, October 30 and Tuesday, November 2, I drove from Durham to Winston-Salem to Asheville to Cherokee to Charlotte to Durham, with excursions to the Blue Ridge Parkway and IKEA. Back to work for three more days, two of which were followed by especially horrible dialysis treatments. (Dialysis remains a shitty ordeal, almost each and every time; but I digress…) I had a 6AM flight out of RDU this past Saturday. I was bound for Austin, but flew into San Antonio via Dulles. I enjoyed two full days in Austin. Today, I took the rental car back to San Antonio from Austin and flew back into RDU via Dulles again. I missed dialysis today, and I don’t care, because enduring a treatment makes me feel worse than I feel when I miss it. Now, back to work for four more days, four final days at my job of five-plus years, before I start my new job on Monday.

Plenty worth writing about concerning my kidneys and dialysis, my career, my trips, and my failure, 98% of the time, to really live life.

For now, and I didn’t mean to write much of anything, I want to post some photos. When finances are faring better, I must get an SLR camera so I can work on taking better pictures. My last decent camera, which had a super zoom and manual controls, broke a couple of months ago. Before my trips, I picked up a dependable, tiny, point-and-shoot. It can take decent pictures, but after having learned what to do with manual mode, I hate lacking control now, where all I can do is pick from automatic or one of a dozen or so “scenes”.

Anyway…the full album (of what I’ve uploaded so far) from the weekend in the N.C. mountains can be found here. And here are some highlights…

Asheville’s Kress Building

Haw Creek Valley off the Blue Ridge Parkway (one of many pics I insisted on uploading even though they all look the same)

Tanbark Ridge off the Blue Ridge Parkway

Haw Creek Valley at dusk