There's Sand in My...Electronics!

There is sand everywhere in my house. We just got back from nearly a week of camping, and I have sand places you do not want to know about. There is sand in my electronics, for pete’s sake! Now that’s just wrong!

Not to mention that the three cats were home alone all that time, and have left us…gifts. They’re sweet and thoughtful that way. So not only is there the sand clean up to think about, but also the empty cupboards and refrigerator, and the full cat litters and veritable mounds of laundry augmented by the bedding full of cat hair because there was no one around to tell them to get their hairy butts of the beds.

I love my pets, I love my pets, I love my pets……

You know, this is really the one week a year when I try to truly take time off and put everything writing and writing related out of mind. As I was lying in the tent one night, the only one awake while rain pounded down on the tarp overhead, I wondered to my self: Why?

If I’m only taking one week out of the year to not think about how many words I have to get written and blogs I have to post and promotions I have to line up, why on earth do I spend it with nothing but a thin veil of canvas and screen between myself and the bears and racoons and chipmunks of the wilds? Why do I spend it cooking over a fire and boiling water in pots to wash up?

The kids love it. Hubs enjoys the outdoors and the campfires.

Me? Sand. Just…sand.

So then I ask myself, will I do it again next year? Probably. We’ve been doing it every year for nearly twenty. Obviously, there is only one solution.

I’ll have to take another week’s vacation to get over it. Somewhere without sand.

Where is your ideal vacation? Is there ever a time when camping is good and right? Like…ever?

Canadian, eh?

So it's well established, I think, that I was in New Orleans this past week. I was attending the first annual Gay Romantic Literature Retreat, and it was a blast. I fully intend to attend the next one, being held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

My husband is trying to talk me into a different sort of vacation.

He wants sand, sun, beaches and heat. And lots of them. Now, I'm not much of a swimmer, and I don't like to sit in the sun, getting hot and sweaty while it bakes me. That just isn't my thing. I told him I'm not interested in a vacation where it's constantly 30C and I'm always sticky and sweaty. This, of course prompted him to look up the weather we would have in New Orleans while I was there and promptly laugh his ass off. It was sunny and hot the entire time, of course.

But that was different. It was New Orleans. My friends were there.

I'm guessing, though I haven't looked, that Albuquerque in October isn't going to be exactly gloves and toque weather...

But this aversion to hot weather leads me to wonder just how Canadian (with a Fin heritage, no less) I really am. As I sit here contemplating the walk to the bus stop through the cold, October Northern Ontario rain, I'm thinking i'm missing a gene somewhere. I don't like hot weather whenever i can get it, and I hate the snow.

How un-Canadian of me...