GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

Back from JoCo Cruise Crazy, had a fantastic time and absolutely no internet of any sort for the last week, and now I have to get used to a marked lack of folded towel animals on my bed in the evening and delivery of milk and cookies in the middle of the night. Also, not sure how I'm going to make it through this upcoming week now that I can no longer take a nap at 2 PM every day. Longer write up may follow later, but the executive summary reads something like "Oh man, did I ever need that."

http://jococruisecrazy.com/

JoCo Cruise Crazy is a 6-day Eastern Caribbean cruise on Holland America’s ms Eurodam, with music and comedy performances from Jonathan Coulton and friends, featuring John Hodgman, Wil Wheaton, Paul and Storm, Bill Corbett & Kevin Murphy from Rifftrax, Molly Lewis, and Mike Phirman. It departs from Ft. Lauderdale, FL on January 2, 2011 and returns January 8, with ports of call at Half Moon Cay, Bahamas; Falmouth, Jamaica; and Georgetown, Cayman Islands.

Come on, you know you want to.

My goal last year was to use all my PTO and not carry any over, but that failed miserably. I have something close to four weeks of vacation and personal time this year that I'd like to use up, even after using the week that I carried over. I'm not sure that this year's going to go much better thanks to combinations of (lack of) money and deadlines, but I'm planning to give it a shot. To try and stave off my imminent mental breakdown thanks to a particularly stressful situation going on, I've been daydreaming about how I'd like to burn those vacation days assuming time and finances allowed. In no particular order:

• If I thought I'd actually get stuff done, I'd take a week off to clean out/up my house.


• Volunteering for a week at Best Friends animal sanctuary in Utah. Since I can't have a dog of my own, this would be a fabulous way to get my doggie fix (and kitties, and bunnies, and horses, and goats, and pigs, and birds) while also lending a hand to one of my favorite organizations.


• A vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. Can I survive a week of noble silence?


• A road trip, using Roadside America as a guidebook. Cheesy roadside attractions, woohoo!


• Festival season! Bumbershoot, Edmonton, Calgary (Chumbawamba acoustic, Great Big Sea, Neko Case, Leo Kottke, Ollabelle, Sarah Slean, Rufus Wainwright, Hawksley Workman), Cambridge (Oysterband, Bruce Cockburn), Blacksun Festival/ProjektFest, Folks Festival (Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Peter Himmelman, The Ditty Bops, Catie Curtis, Guggenheim Grotto), Falcon Ridge (Dar Williams, Eddie from Ohio, John Gorka, Lowen & Navarro, Marshall Crenshaw), 50 Years of Stax benefit, FloydFest (DeVotchKa, North Mississippi All-Stars, Donna the Buffalo, The Duhks, Scythian), Tønder Festival (Levellers, Great Big Sea, Solas, Karan Casey Band), Nordic Roots Festival
  


• A week in London. Ditto Paris/Rome/Florence/Kyoto/Tokyo/St. Petersburg. And Cuba, if it wouldn't net me a big fine and a lot more hassle than I want to deal with.


• My long-delayed (we're talking like three years) trip to LA to meet folks.


• Portland, OR. If I can make myself leave Powell's, I'd offer to buy pdx42 a drink.


• A cruise (Alaska or Mediterranean). If I'm dreaming, I might as well go for a transatlantic crossing on the QE2.

Today is Pungenday, day 44 in the season of Bureaucracy, 3271.

Random thoughts about the beach trip:

I suspect I enjoyed Rehoboth more than I might've Ocean City anyway, especially since there were far fewer bikers on incredibly loud Harleys cruising the streets. Plus, they have a Lambda Rising outpost.

$160 a night for an Econo Lodge not remotely near the water is a bit much, but not as much as the $279 someone else was paying, which we discovered when checking out as he was pitching a fit at the desk that even though he'd signed the paper with the rate when he got in the night before, it wasn't what his wife was quoted on the phone. (Dude, you sign that paper agreeing to the rate and you're pretty much screwed. And you can't claim that it's the wrong name on the reservation when it's apparently the same as the one on your credit card.)

Outlet mauls were conquered, and the mighty hunters have returned with a car trunk full of swag.

Still making me giggle: the little girl, maybe 5 years old, who said loudly, "Mama, I can't stop dancing!!" in the middle of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" as they were playing it in the restaurant. And it was true, she danced around in her chair to the whole thing.

Bacon ice cream. And pumpkin mushroom, and pizza, and hot sauce. And Cialis. (I did not try any of the preceding flavors, the thought was too horrifying. Except for hot sauce, which might've been okay.)

Grotto Pizza definitely owns all of Rehoboth Beach, although they haven't worked up so far as I can tell to owning entire states like Pepsi does. Also, I think there's some rule in the books that you have to be very tall and very attractive to work at (or maybe own) Go Fish!

Lots of dolphins just offshore on Sunday, all of whom seem to have a keenly developed sense of when cameras are put away so that they can resume jumping around.

Not half-bad surf on Friday evening. (Thanks, Ophelia.) Surprisingly little rain, except for very late Saturday night. Next time, budget more time to sit on the beach in the sun, maybe send C. off for go-karts while I nap on the beach.

Neither of us knows off the tops of our heads which countries don't have extradition treaties with the US.

Even taking into account getting on the road after eating a plate of fish and chips and fighting off the resulting food coma, my 2.5 hour drive home Sunday was far less hassle than C.'s 5 hour drive up on Friday. (Yes, we left late in the day and hit rush hour in both DC and Annapolis.) On both occasions, we got to remark on how musically "Alice in Wonderland" by Randell & Schippers is really not so good, but the "WTF???!!???" amusement factor is high enough that the channel doesn't get changed.