Vacation images

I could live here forever.

I couldn’t get over the colors.

Does anyone know how to read chinese?

 

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

When I think back on the vacations I took as a kid, two very specific images come to mind.  One is my sister, best friend, my grandmother, and myself sitting around my aunt’s kitchen table at the beach, eating ice cream out of the container at 3 a.m while playing rummy with rules so incorrect that it really should have been called something else, like Fake Card Game With Changing, Arbitrary Guidelines Made Up By Grandma.  Ice cream at three a.m. was just one of the things on the long list of “Stuff You Don’t Tell Your Parents You Did After They Dropped You Off for Vacation”  Other things included allowing my then eight-year-old sister to watch Letterman and advocating the purchase of neon yellow nail polish.

The other image seared into my brain is posing for a picture with my sister next to anything that could possibly pass as A  Place of Historical Importance.  If George Washington once sneezed anywhere between South Carolina and New Hampshire, chances are good I’ve been there.  You can probably find a snapshot of me with a half-hearted smile of my face (because really, is it necessary to visit the house of Abraham Lincoln’s son?) accompanied by my sister, who can probably be seen clutching a paper bag containing historically-themed stationery.

The beach I loved, the historical tours I now appreciate because they help win Trivial Pursuit.

Now that I’m a grown-up, I get to choose where we go on vacation.  Then my husband points out that no, Johnny Depp probably doesn’t want houseguests, and no, he’s pretty sure he didn’t accidentally buy  Jay-Z’s yacht as a surprise, so why don’t we go to California?  Easy enough.  When you dangle shiny, cross-country trips in front of me, I’m easily distracted and much agreeable.  As long as I don’t have to care who took a piss there in 1783.

In the halcyon days of youth, preparing for vacation meant shoving as many books and swimsuits as possible into a bag.  Now it means shoving as much work as humanly possible into the day before we leave, having a internal meltdown about packing because that’s what I do, lighting candles in front of statues of the patron saint of please make sure our flights aren’t cancelled, and praying that there’s no BlackBerry service where we’re going.  (Not likely, as on our last vacation, I turned around from the spectacle of a mud volcano in Yellowstone National Park to see my husband ON THE PHONE WITH HIS ASSISTANT.   If he can get calls in the middle of a national park, I’m pretty sure my hopes of the excuse of “oops, sorry, no coverage in this little backwater town called San Francisco” won’t cut it.

Anyway, after all those things get finished,  we’ll be here, here, and here.  And will most likely wind up our trip here.

Sad

Pass the pig

I haven’t eaten much since Saturday.  This is because I am going on a ritual semi-fast before the Virginia Pork Festival on Wednesday.  Though my husband is the bigger lover of cooked up pig parts, I’m the one who pulled the trigger on the tickets.

I’m attending in part for the delicous food, but mainly, I’m going for the spectacle of it all.

I adore spectacles.  I love when large groups of people lose their inhibitions, stop caring what other people think, and start acting ridiculous (read: all of my family get-togethers, ever .)  This is why I went to the Harry Potter book release party at midnight with my sister, having not read a single tittle in the series; it’s why I go shopping on Black Friday and stand in line on the first night of any Star Wars premiere.

I want to see grownups wearing pig noses and pig ears, and I’m really hoping people start oinking at each other.  I’m planning on taking pictures of as many mullets as I can.

I’ll report back after I process the glory of it all.

In which I clarify

This morning, I got an email from a very dear friend.  The subject line was “this could be you”, and the body contained a singular link to this webpage.

Let’s get one thing straight, friends of mine.  I want to hang out with Anderson Cooper at his anchor desk, discuss the news with him, possibly go to the gym and then the spa, spend some time shopping for blue safari shirts that double as reporting-on-a-tsunami business casual, maybe head into a war zone together wearing hot little flak jackets.  I want him to show me how to roll up my sleeves so I look fashionable but still disheveled enough to be taken seriously in the middle of a hurricane-ravaged town.

It’s a completely platonic affection born of my extreme news addiction and love of first two seasons of The Mole.  I don’t want to tattoo his face anywhere on my person.  I prefer not to wear my crazy quite that obviously.

Boo-Boo

For some reason, whenever I talk about Anderson Cooper, traffic to this blog quadruples.

I was trying to find the video clip on you tube of Anderson asking Donna Brazile to be his boo. It cracks me up every time, because while all the other guests were laughing at him and at his ignorance of the term, the Coop had no idea what he had just asked.

You know deep down inside, he had to be thinking, “Yeah, um, I don’t have time to learn the lingo of the times, because I have been way too busy seeing bodies on the streets of Mississippi being eaten by rats, did you know they were being eaten by rats, and have you heard about the time I snuck my way into darkest Burmas a teenager to film things? I am a Serious Journalist. I have amazing white hair. You will never have hair like me. You will never look as good as I do in a blue Prada camp shirt with rolled-up sleeves. So what if  I asked Donna Brazile to be my lover. SO WHAT? Maybe I have jungle fever and you just don’t know it. You all know I make it a point not to discuss my love life. Maybe I want to dress up in her superdelegate cape and fight crime. I see things in 360 degrees, bitches, so STEP OFF. “

Anyway, I instead stumbled this clip, made most likely in all earnestness, and I’m not sure whether to laugh my ass off or be very, very scared, because I think I’ve found the source of my quadrupled blog traffic.

And by base camp, surely they mean “lido deck”

I’ve been a devoted fan of Reef brand flip flops for a long time, but our relationship might be over. Last weekend, I saw these by the North Face and quizzically tried them on. They’re sort of weird-looking, but any hestiation I had disappeared after I took a few steps.

It’s like wearing a mattress egg crate pad on your feet, and they run large. A size nine fit me, and friends, I a am no size nine. They are not the most attractive flip flop, but then when you hear your toes cry tears of joy at the comfort, you won’t care. (Take that with a grain of salt, because I drive a Honda Element, a car I thought was incredibly hideous until I test drove it and realized, hey, this car may look like a breadbox on wheels, but look at the 64 seating configurations.)

Buy some now. I got the black ones – they fit in so well with my working at home dress code of bathing suit and sun hat.

Perspective

At the pool today,  three girls who probably just finished their freshman year in college came and sat near me. Since they were doing that thing where they talked really loud because they wanted everyone at the pool to know that they are skinny and in sororities and hot and awesome, I got to hear all about their lives and worries. Their major concerns were maybe thinking about finding a job for the summer and getting ready to go on vacation. And also, where to go out tonight. And also, if they looked fat, and how fat/skinny their roommates are, and how much weight they gained while studying abroad to make them fat, and how much they hate their sorority sisters who are skinnier than them, and how their boobs were too small, and why they need their dad to buy them a new car, and so on, and so forth.

I wanted to say to them, look, ladies, we’ve all been there. Sometimes in life, you’re so wrapped up in your little, private world full of dramas and tanning and studying and boys that you have no perspective, and you can’t appreciate things like paid-for tuition and free cars. Heck, ten years ago, that might have been me sitting there twirling my long, meticulously-highlighted hair around my finger while I spewed forth ridiculous nonsense.

But one day very soon, you’re going to graduate, your dad is going to take back his credit card, you’re going to suddenly gain ten pounds because the cruelest joke of all is that your metabolism slows down just at the time you realized how great it was to eat an entire meal again. And you’ll be hit with the realization that things such as toothpaste and meticulous highlights and bikinis and beer? These things do not in fact magically materialize but instead cost money. Your own money, which you will not have enough of for a while. It will be strange, and it will be hell to get used to at first. .

And then, ten years will pass, and you’ll realize exactly how lucky and ridiculous you were one very hot June day at the pool.

You’re grounded

First thing this morning, I logged into the weather channel’s website to check the weather, and promptly began to weep.

100 degrees this weekend?  The first weekend in June?  WTF, Mother Nature?!  I am not yet mentally prepared for a heat wave.  I’ve never really grown accustomed to the way in which Richmond suddenly smacks you in the face with the full force of summer,  the way every year, things suddenly change from two days of pleasant, lovely, temperate, perfect spring to hey wait, how did I suddenly become an extra in Lawrence of Arabia?

I miss Pennsylvania’s long, lazy, entirely civilized slide into summer.  Sure, we had hot days in June, but never in the triple digits, and rarely did we see a 90 anywhere in the forecast until mid-July.

Richmond, for all your talk of being genteel and polite and considering your claims of southern hospitality, the way you handle seasonal transitions is incredibly rude, and I think you should spend some time in your room to think about what you’ve done.