NEVER AGAIN

My husband has taken three consecutive weeks off of work this summer. Such a thing has never happened before. The result was we spent five days at the lake with my parents – during which we left the kids for a night and road-tripped to Jasper, just the two of us – then after less than 20 hours at home, we left again for ten days with his parents. It was a lot of fun, but I am definitely glad to be home again, not the least because I put on jeans this morning and had to jump around just to get them on. I have Post-Vacation Too-Tight Pants Syndrome. Thank goodness for long shirts, is all I can say at the moment. Who knew that averaging four drinks a day over a two week period would cause weight gain and bloating?

We got home yesterday, and I was a bit distressed at the state of my garden; the city had been hot and dry while we were gone, and my plants were a bit crunchy. We put the sprinkler on for a few hours, rotating it carefully around the yard, when a gigantic thunderstorm hit and we received several hours of steady rain. The garden is no longer crispy.

This vacation marks the first time ever that I have under-packed, and I shall never do it again. I packed three skorts, a few tank tops, two beach dresses, and some bikinis, along with a pair of knee-length yoga pants and some very light t-shirts. I figured the weather was going to be too hot to need pants or sweaters, and things are pretty casual on the vineyard. Wouldn’t you know, the first two days were cooler than normal, rendering my light pants-less wardrobe insufficient, AND we got invited to a fairly dressy function, to which I wore a striped beach dress and sandals dating from 2009. Never again will I travel without my usual five pairs of shoes and little black dress just in case. Packing light is not for me. NEVER AGAIN.

I was largely unplugged for the vacation, save for a few things I had to do for work. I did, however, witness outrage about the killing of Cecil the lion, followed by outrage about the outrage, followed by photo memes that dealt with the following: a) why should we be outraged by a lion’s killing when there are so many human rights violations in the world, b) photos of farm animals captioned “If I was a lion, would you care about me?”, and c) photos of fetuses captioned “If we were selling lion body parts, would you care?”

HONESTLY PEOPLE. Mass outrage and then mass outrage about mass outrage and then MEMES about mass outrage about mass outrage showcases everything that is wrong in the world today. I love the internet and I certainly do not want to go back to the days of the rotary phone and looking things up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but this – what my friend Swistle calls The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking – is one of my least favourite things. And to top it off, there is an election coming up. Two elections, if you happen to have friends in both the US and Canada. God help us all.

I don’t know how you feel, but the prelude to an election makes me long for the days when you didn’t really know where acquaintances’ political sympathies lay, unless you noticed a campaign sign on their front lawns or a pointed letter to the editor in your local newspaper. To me, politics is just too intimate to discuss; I find conversations about elections to be awkward and uncomfortable, not unlike someone telling me about their partner’s proclivity for porn or their own fantasies of being the girl in 50 Shades of Grey. These are things that I don’t want to know, it’s information that I just don’t want to have. Just like I don’t want to hear someone’s husband’s name and the words “loves anal” in the same sentence, I don’t want to know anyone’s voting preferences, unless we are very good friends, and then it is okay but I still prefer not to talk about it. I prefer my Facebook feed to be filled with photos of pets, kids, vacations, and what you ate on the 30 Day Shred. More puppies, less politics – maybe I should make it a hashtag.