I'm dreaming of home...

Sara and I have ended up staying at Mom’s house for much longer than planned, which has both ups and downs. Although I’ve enjoyed seeing Grandma, Adam, Athena, Sable, the cats, playing Adam’s Wii, eating Grandma’s spaghetti, and updating my iPod (I have 80 songs on it now), overall this trip has been extremely depressing. I’ve come to realize that I no longer consider Mom’s house my home, which I suppose means I’m growing up. The disrespect that Mom shows to me and, to a much greater degree, Sara is simply unbelievable, especially when compared with her favoritism for Ben and Adam. She has been treating us this way for as long as I can remember, so I should be used to it by now, but for some reason, I’m not. It’s still very hurtful. I’m also looking forward to leaving because I forgot my preventative medecine, and so my asthma has been very bad here (it’s always worse around Sable). I lost count of how many times I woke up wheezing last night, and my albuterol inhaloer is running low.

I think Ben has gotten weirder since the last time I saw him, judging by the comment he made when he saw me reading an article on the French presidential election in Paris Match: "I’m glad they elected Sarkozy." I turned around and yelled "What?!" so loudly that I think Ben actually jumped. He said something about Segolene Royal being a fascist and Nicolas Sarkozy being the lesser of two evils, and I could have argued with him, but I was too shocked. I keep forgetting that just because everyone in the LSU French Department hates Sarkozy, it doesn’t mean everyone in the world does. Obviously a lot of people don’t hate him, or he wouldn't have been elected.

Something else I’ve realized while I’ve been here is that besides being a great cook and gardener, Grandma is a spectacular amateur photographer. This is especially obvious in photos of her children when they were young. A found a big box of them at her house and many of them were so beautiful that I had to ask Grandma if she had ever studied photography (she never has, which I should have assumed, given what I already know about her education).