Oh How Sweet It Is

I am officially on vacation until July 23rd. If you need me, you can find me on a beach in Canada hanging with the Fam, sipping cocktails and eating great food.

You wanna know what’s so great about vacation (of course you do). Let’s make a list (oooh, I’m giddy with excitement):

• Sipping Mai Tai’s: confession: I don’t know what’s in a Mai Tai, but I like the name and if Jay-Z drinks them, then surely I can too.

• Badminton: the Fam and I play a mean game of badminton, or at least we did ten years ago, and I’m sure our skills haven’t deteriorated over time. I know our competitive spirit hasn’t. Let me paint a picture: the last family visit, we played four square with my eleven year old niece, and the game was silly and fun until my Da (he only goes by Da now because he’s too cool for the last “d”) joined the game and immediately spiked the ball on me. Bring it on Da; payback’s a bitch.

•  No Work: I will be completely unplugged and off the grid. No emails, no voice mails, and no texts. I will disappear like a ninja into the night….”And like that..(poof)..she’s gone.” Bonus points if you know what movie I’m quoting, and if you don’t, you must see this movie; it’s one of my absolute favorites (yes, yes, I get the irony and will reveal the movie later if someone else doesn’t).

• Great Food with Many Helping Hands: my family knows how to eat and eat well, and most of them like to cook, so I am going to be consuming really fabulous food all week, and I won’t have to prepare it all by myself.

Millions of peaches, peaches for me. Millions of peaches, peaches for free.

Fruit: my fruit addiction is second only to my father’s. If you think I’ve got it bad, you should see him; he will literally go to the market and buy a basket of fresh fruit every day, so I plan to gorge myself on fruit all week. Sweet, sweet nectar of the gods.

• Dessert: I absolutely will be indulging in some delicious and devilish desserts. I’m on vacation after all, and let me say, my family knows how to do dessert. We don’t mess around, and we only get the ones worth the calories. And if my Da has anything to say about it, there will be fruit in the dessert (Bonus!).

• Bike Rides: there is a phenomenal 150 kilometer bike path (you know you’re in a different country when they use the metric system) literally a stone’s throw away from the cottage where we’ll be staying, and I plan to get in some great rides. “She’s going for distance, she’s going for speed.” Anyone else game?

• S’mores and Beach Bonfires: need I say more.

Hey Gang, can we set up a table in the background and eat on the beach too. It would look great on my blog next week….

• Puzzles: every year there’s a new puzzle and our mission is to complete it before the week is out. I love, love, love puzzles because everything has a proper place and fits perfectly together. I could happily spend hours matching and inserting the little pieces. I was on jury duty once, and it was one of the best weeks of my life. I never made it into a court room and instead spent the week doing puzzles. I did two one thousand piece puzzles in four days, and over the course of these days, a small crowd grew around me; I was like the idiot savant of the puzzle world. Surely, there will be puzzles in my Heaven.

Lists, Lists, and More Lists: going on vacation means creating several lists with categories and subcategories. Boy oh boy, am I in my element. For example, I have a list of things to pack, which is then broken down into subcategories: Kitchen Supplies (never leave home without your knife; hopefully I don’t get stopped by border patrol), Clothing, Miscellaneous (sun screen, beach towels), Games (volleyball, Scattegories, baseball glove), Electronics (Kindle, iPad, speakers), Food (granola, veggies from my CSA, fresh herbs). Then there’s the list of things to do before we leave (laundry, ironing (yes the same ironing from last weekend which obviously didn’t get done), pedicure, cleaning (I refuse to come home to a messy house). And I have three full days to work on my lists, since we don’t actually leave until Monday morning. It’s gonna be a great long weekend, and yes I know, I might be a little bit crazy.

Final thoughts for today:

1. Have a great weekend. I hope it rocks your world.
2. Check out Antonia at Health Inspirations who gave me a shout out on her blog today. She’s my first (wink, wink). I ♥ her, and I’ve probably just scared her off.
3. I may or may not be blogging next week, so if I am MIA, forgive me, but don’t forget about me. I’m hoping to do a couple posts, but making no promises.

Until we meet again…

What’s your favorite things about vacation?  Are you also secretly obsessed with puzzles or list making?  It’s o.k. if you are; you’re not alone; we could form a support group.