My parents came to visit over the weekend. We had a blast. On Saturday, I did some shopping with my mom, and I managed to buy a bathing suit. (I don't know why - I always seem to end up buying bathing suits in the middle of the winter. But I'm going to Hawai'i in a couple of weeks, and I didn't have a bathing suit that actually fit and was in decent condition. Now I have one. Lord knows if I'll use it on this trip to Hawai'i, but you can't go to Hawai'i without a bathing suit, can you?)

Actually, the shopping gods were smiling on me there - there were two bathing suits on the rack in something resembling my size that were not totally ugly. (I don't know why, but brown and pink (together!) seem to be big colors for bathing suits right now. I refuse to wear a brown and pink bathing suit.)

Just to balance the shopping karma scales, though, every pair of pants that I tried on was hideous. Urk. It's just good that I can get away with wearing jeans to work.

On Sunday, my parents wanted to go see the Winchester Mystery House, so that's what we did. (I suppose that as genuine San Jose landmarks go, the Winchester Mystery House is one of a relatively small number of options.) It was more fun than I expected. They have fairly knowledgeable and entertaining guides on the tours. (We did the whole shebang, which includes both the mansion tour and a "Behind the Scenes" tour, which goes into the cellars and some of the outbuildings.) You can pick up some interesting glimpses of life in Victorian-era San Jose. And the famous architectural oddities of windows in floors, staircases that lead to nowhere, and doors that open onto to 8 foot drops are amusing.

It is kind of a depressing place in a way, though. A lot of the house seems quite small, cramped, and dark - though perhaps at the time, with its original furnishings, it was more comfortable. (The original furniture was removed after Mrs. Winchester's death - some rooms have been refurnished with approximations of what was there before, but there's no real way of knowing how accurate these approximations were.) Also - and this is something to keep in mind if you visit in the winter - the house is not heated, and it was quite cold, especially in the basement.

The gardens are neat, though - they have a lot of different plants there.

Anyway, it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and it was one of those quintessentially touristy things that you only end up doing when you have out of town guests.

My parents flew back to North Carolina this morning. They've already started talking about coming back to California this summer and taking me and Daniel on a road trip through Napa, so I guess they must have enjoyed themselves.