Weekend!

I went to Canada for one week. Maribou went for two in order to celebrate Thanksgiving (Canada) with her family for the first time in many years.

Which means that I got to spend this last week doing the thing where I come home and, as I walk in the door, the cats keep looking behind my ankles for the nice one.

Of course, the week has been absolutely nutso at work (two coworkers call in sick for pretty much all week, two coworkers offsite for two weeks, another coworker gives his two weeks’ notice, *AND* my seating arrangement gets moved without telling the IT guys so I don’t have a phone and without telling the facilities guys so I don’t have a desk).

All that to say: I am never going on vacation ever again.

Well, not *NEVER*, but for a week? Man. Everything goes wrong. Better to just take a couple of days off and turn a weekend into a four-day weekend and spend it in the basement pantsless. In the worst case there, everything at work catches fire, they call you, you put on pants, you go into work.

That said, it was *EXCEPTIONALLY* nice to be in a place that had no cell service, only a little bit of Wi-Fi, and absolutely zero light pollution. Our first night there, we got out of the car and began to walk to the cabin and as the dome light in the car died, I looked up at the sky and saw the sky my ancestors saw: the milky way in all its glory. Constellations not merely made up of a handful of points of light, but made up of thousands of stars that added contours and depth to brighter points and gave a texture that let you say “holy cow… you can see why they said that that was a great bear”.

In any case, I got back last week and said “if Maribou isn’t here, neither will I be on the diet” so I did a good job of extending my vacation another week even taking account into the fact that I’ll have worked 40 hours this week before I finish Friday’s morning pizza.

Which brings us to this weekend:

Maribou gets back on Saturday evening. She will very likely be even more wrecked by her flight home than I was by mine. So I’m going to spend Saturday doing the stuff that involves going to the various stores around town and then pick her up and bring her home and then plop her into bed or in front of the computer and do my best to make sure that she gets hydrated, has a bottle of aspirin nearby just-in-case, and otherwise can decompress from the whole “14 hours in airplanes/airports” thing.

And then, Sunday, I understand that The Deck we’ve been building will have had the last of the final touches applied to it and we’ll see if we have the strength to leave the house (but I’ll try to sneak out if a nap is occurring).

And then, after that, we can see if I have a desk on Monday.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Image is “Play” by Clare Briggs. Used with permission of the Briggs estate.)