Rhett Butler

3 weeks ago I realized I badly needed a vacation. I asked for two weeks and it was granted. It started this weekend.

At first I decided I’d keep up with email while I was away. My colleagues found out about this and nearly beat me over the head. NO EMAIL. And they have these evil ways of testing you. Like they send you an email with the subject line: “Revised Executive Order speaks directly to viability of MeL” and they can see if you’ve opened it from their email client. Busted.

By the time my last two days rolled around I kept repeating, “I need a vacation” until my colleagues were rolling their eyes saying, “You so need a vacation. This is not brain surgery. No one is going to die.”

The start of my vacation will be spent having a sleep-over at my mom’s with our favorite restaurants and a movie. Part B will be hangin’ in Lansing doing stuff I like but never have time to do. The second part will be spent in Milwaukee with Scott’s family.

The third part.

The third part is that I’m brushing the dust off this town off my size 9 tennis shoes and taking myself to Charleston, South Carolina. Every once in a while I need a vacation just to myself. Hubby does the same.  Some vacations we spend together, others alone pursuing our particular interests.

And my particular interest is a hot, muggy, historical, beautiful city with good restaurants and the chance to meet Rhett Butler around every corner. I’ll tweet it as I am not taking a computer with me. And try to do a better job of tweeting it than I did on my recent trip to Traverse City which I realized, when I re-read it, was a bit hard to follow.

Two Words

Root Canal

Secrets of the Night

I’m still walking to Quality Dairy for my morning coffee,  a round trip of about 40 minutes. As noted, QD opens at 6 a.m.

I started this exercise in late May, when it was already light out at 5:45, my usual time for leaving the house lest I walk too fast and arrive before 6:00. (Some day in July the cranky employee that I ticked off on one of my earliest visits complimented my French braid and we’re all chummy now.)  First shift turnover is terrible, though, and every time I use my sparkliness to win over a new cashier, she leaves.

Now, though, there’s barely a streak of light in the East when I leave the house. This has led to a quiet, secret new activity: jogging.

I don’t jog worth a damn. I’m heavy, ungraceful, I can’t jog far in any case, I get winded quickly, my body bounces in unflattering ways, and there are few places one can go to jog where sleek, buff, built joggers of both sexes don’t fly by you, making me, anyway, feel very self-conscious.

But. But in the middle of the dark, where no one can see you have to stop after a short way, where there is no competition (even if that competition is only  in my mind), I can indulge in short, “Yaaaay Snakelady” spurts of activity down quiet, sleeping, neighborhood streets.

Be ye of calm mind, about your neighborhood as well, quiet victories are won by strangers who like your choice of siding.