Well, hello there, stranger!

How have you been?  I’ve been away.  I just spent a week with my in-laws, and I ONLY have nice things to say.  We had fabulous weather, we had lots of fun, and I discovered something about myself: I am naturally a rigid and rule-oriented person (this is not part of my self-discovery; I knew that already) but with effort, I can be very easy-going.  I KNOW.  I also realized that by only reacting agreeably to anything that I may have, in the past, taken in a hurtful or negative way, not only diminishes the effect of hurtful and/or negative comments, but it also diminishes the frequency of such comments!  Do you see what I’m saying here?  It’s a miracle of epic proportions!  You know that saying that no one can hurt your feelings without your permission?  Well, I actually think that saying is bullshit.  I mean, take it from the flip side – does that mean we all have license to act like total assholes, and if someone is hurt by our actions, we can simply say that they allowed themselves to be hurt?  I don’t fucking think so.  But I’m here to tell you, in a modified way, that we really, truly, cannot control what others do but we can control our own reactions and behaviour. 

You know what else makes a person calm and easy-going?  Booze and saturated fat.  Just try it; right now, drink three beers in rapid succession, eat half a bag of potato chips, and just see how relaxed you become.  Easy like Sunday morning, I’m telling you.  You will not be bothered by endless conjectures concerning who, exactly, your children take after, or why, exactly, you still get blemishes at age 37.  Who cares!  Another beer?  Yes please!

The kids were astonished by my new persona, who they dubbed Vacation Mom.  Vacation Mom buys potato chips at the grocery store, Vacation Mom allows them to eat Aero bars at 9:30 in the morning, Vacation Mom even went down the waterslides and got her hair all wet at the water park.  Vacation Mom is a lot of fun, but sadly, she’s dead now.  Regular Mom is back.  Regular Mom is also very tired and somewhat brain dead.

This is how my day has been: up at 4:45 to pack up the car, on the road at 5:45.  Drive for seven hours and fifteen minutes, which includes two short stops.  We made “great time”.  Do you have a spouse, or are you yourself someone who loves to make “good time”?  Before we left, my husband and I were talking to a friend who had just made a similar road trip to us, and she mentioned all the places on the way she liked to stop with her kids to break up the drive.  My husband and I both looked at her nonplussed.  We never want to break up the drive.  We always want to just get there already, dammit.  Clearly we are not those “the journey is half the fun” people.  We’re all about the destination.  This surely is some kind of metaphor about our lives but I’m too tired to make the metaphoric leap.

Once we got home we discovered we had an ANT INFESTATION – it was less of an infestation, really, and more of a “the ants have found their way in through a teeny crack in the foundation” but yet I had a slight ant-related meltdown.  Fortunately my husband is very, very good at dealing with such matters, and we seem to have things under control.  I have seen nary an ant over the past two hours.  I unpacked, cleaned things frantically, did a mountain of laundry – despite doing laundry every single day on vacation – purchased groceries not of the potato chip variety, and then, in a stunning climax to this weird day, stabbed myself in the foot with my nail scissors.  I mean, I really stabbed myself.  I am wearing a Hello Kitty bandage as we speak.

This, too, feels somewhat like a metaphor, but I’m TIRED.  I have much to say about vacation, and about the lovely bloggy award that my dear, dear friend Hannah gave me – my bloggy bestie – and about how my dog now has the whitest teeth after consuming approximately, and not exaggeratedly, one hundred Milk Bones over the past seven days.  But I’m exhausted, and I need a shower, and I sure hope said shower gets that creepy-crawly ant-infestation feeling. 

So tell me, lovies, how was your week? xo