So, yeah, it's hard to blog when your weekly allotted blogging time is spent in a car or under a cabana. And I hafta tell you, given the choice? I'll take the car or cabana. What a great time.
And another thing? Coming back from such a restful situation and falling into the Facebook fray of Trayvon Martin and the Texas Legislature and I don't know what all? Makes me think Facebook is a horrible place and I either need to drop about half the people on my friends list, or else people in general need to post less, read more, and try using their brain instead of insisting they already know everything about everything. I realize I'm not a big position person, and that I tend to reserve judgment and go oveboard on benefit of the doubt. I suppose there are rabble rousers who find this distasteful. The nice thing is, I find them equally abhorrent. Like this person, who was quite upset about the Martin ruling and recommended seeing The Lone Ranger as a palliative because it is subversive: "SCOFF at the lead white man who believes in courthouse justice, believes The US goverenment would honor treaties, and that the US army is honorable and see how he is butt of his own joke.This scathing rebuke of white America in the guise of Disney fun is not going to last on the big screen." Yeaaaaahhh, I'm sure it's Disney's deeply anti-establishment stance that explains the movie's failure. Not the blasting that critics gave it for boring effects, bloated writing, and not-funny jokes. Whatever, y'all.
So, let's see. The Tennessee week was pretty much as I described in advance. The house was spotless, the lads had fun on their trip, we were all glad to see each other upon return.
That Saturday we packed everything up, got in the car at a horrible early hour, and headed south. Not Your Average Blogger drove. The Young Prince played videogames in the back seat. Me? I read Fifty Shades of Grey. Oh, my god, what a wonderful, horrible, hilarious book. It's like the Howard the Duck of softcore smut. I got it because I am figuring that a book I'm working on will have to have at least a couple sex scenes, and since I was in 9th grade the last time I read anything about heaving bodices, I figured I should see how it's done. I think what I got instead was how NOT to do it. But I also got a laugh a page, which made the whole thing well worth it. NYAB suggested the title be changed to "Fifty Shades of Dying Gray Matter," which fits nicely.
I also read the entire Wicked series by Gregory Maguire. Much better writing, much higher language and structure and much more literary. Not nearly as many gut laughs. Having never seen the musical, I'm still trying to figure out how they took such a dark, political, angry book and made it into fluffy operatic fare.
We stayed in Rodanthe, but spent a lot of time out and about. We drove up to Duck one day to see the shmancy houses and get doughnuts. (I"m sorry to report we all found the doughnuts a little Meh.)We drove to Kill Devil Hills a couple times to go to the movies and see the Wright Brothers exhibit. (Unfortunately, that was the one day it rained like mad, so we missed a lot of it, and the kid wouldn't flop on his belly for my photo.)
We saw Despicable Me 2 and Monsters U. We saw three lighthouses (Cape Hattaras, Bodie's, and Curratuck, in that order,) and climbed them all.
We also climbed a giant sand dune and pretended we were on Tatooine. (And yet, I am not any fitter.)
We also ate a lot, and spent a lot of time at the pool, on the beach, and on the cabin deck looking at the beach and at the stars.
All in all, such a great trip we have already booked a place to go next year.
Then we were back home, and I went back to work and played catch-up, and NYAB stayed home and wrote and held down the fort. The kid went to camp, but on the third day suffered an unfortunate altercation with a counselor. But we are all holding his breath that he learned his lesson, and he goes back Monday for another chance. Hoping he can last for the duration.
Especially because the ease of retrieval will be less easy. On Monday, NYAB also starts a new job! It's not my tale to tell, so I haven't said much if anything about it, but he took a buyout a while back, and has been home reading and writing and hausfrauing while hunting around for a new gig. He'll be here.
So I am hoping the next few weeks are fairly routine and humdrum. At the end of August, we are off to Illinois, where the kid will stay while NYAB and I jaunt off to Kansas City for our anniversary, then the kid and I are going to DragonCon in Atlanta, where we will stay with the inimitable Katherine, and then school starts. Fits and starts, I tell you.
Comments