Imagine the following paragraph in a sing-songy chant, if you would:

Vacation starts tomorrow! Vacation starts tomorrow! Vacation starts tomorrow!

Ahem. Thanks.

Yeah, I'm excited. Of course. I haven't been able to scrapbook for more than about an hour at a time while Matt's been gone, and a whole weekend dedicated to it -- even if I take some time off for other stuff -- might see me "caught up," so to speak.

Plus, it'll be kind of like an enormous slumber party -- there's going to be like 15 or 16 hens in the house, and I already know more than half of them (friends from work, mostly, and K.T.). We'll eat junk food and talk about babies and husbands, and play games and watch movies. I'll walk on the beach and take pictures of the waves rolling in. And just to be really redundant and silly, I'll take pictures of us working on our scrapbooks.

I'm already sort of trying to brace myself for the fact that it's going to be waaaay too short. Weekend trips always are.

But there are (unrelated) festivities today, too. Matt's officemate organized a welcome-home luncheon for him today -- comprised almost entirely of people who work (or used to work) at his office. That includes me, though it's been five years since I worked there. I wasn't sure about going, but a combination of factors added up, so that's my lunch today. It'll be nice to see everyone, actually.

And it seems like half the office is taking tomorrow off, for one reason or another, which means this afternoon will be either slow or very busy. If it's slow, I might take off just a little early, to do some of my shopping tonight.

Tomorrow I'll get up as usual, and see Matt and Penny off. Then I'll pack, and do whatever shopping remains, and stop at the ATM. Not necessarily in that order. And then I'll head down to K.T.'s. And then I'll be on vacation! Whoo!

...Today's going to crawl.

"Any idea what time you're getting back Sunday?" Matt asked me last night.

"Um... Late afternoon? Early evening?"

"Okay. Guess I'll do the grocery shopping, then."

I started to feel guilty about making him do all the grocery shopping by himself, and then I thought about doing it by myself for the past two months, and it faded. I will do up a menu for next week and get a list started for him tonight, though. Not because I don't trust him to do it, but because I don't expect him to remember, say, the ingredients list for my soup.

I feel like I should talk about other things, but my brain is utterly consumed by thoughts of vacation.

Writing? Going okay, I guess. I got over a bit of a hump yesterday, and that felt good even if I only wrote about 700 words.

(You know, I can distinctly remember being in school and being told I had to write a 500-word essay, and groaning at the horrible injustice of it all... Two whole pages? Heh.)

And K.T. got into the groove and wrote over 2000 words yesterday, which must have felt fantastic -- and the writing really showed it, too. It was smooth and sharp. You can almost see the dividing line between when she was settling in, and when she actually snapped into the groove. It's neat.

Penny? She's good. Flat refused to nap yesterday, so she was a bit on the cranky side last night, but she managed to hold it together well enough that we didn't send her to bed early. And she woke up on her own this morning, around 6:45, so I guess she's starting to adjust to the Daylight Saving Time.

Vacation vacation vacation.

See you Monday!

--Liz