• Bug,  Life Lessons,  travel

    Recap: Vacation Day 4,5,6
    and all the rest of those days that sort of ran together

    touching the lake

    I wrote up until day three of our vacation and then I let go of my self-inflicted work ethic. Without the internet to check in on me, days ran into each other and I left my laptop alone more and more. Being bored was actually kind of fun. Want to instantly be transported back to your youth? Let yourself get bored.

    Bug and I probably threw enough rocks into the lake to alter it’s geography. It was completely boring but strangely I didn’t feel agitated to go find something else to do. It was more important to just sit there and record every little nuance of boredom because it might not happen again for a long time.

    Time crawled. We got so bored that fishing was the most exciting thing to do. We fished every day. We caught so many fish that even catching them got boring but we kept doing it anyway. It was a perfectly happy and content boredom, something I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable with before. But here I was completely comfortable. The slower the day went by, the better. I’ve never had a vacation that didn’t fly by before. It was strange but wonderful.

    There is nothing like the sound of grasshoppers snapping their wings in the air as they fly from one sitting place to the next. Flies buzzing off in the distance not giving you the time of day because they have other things to do. The still air, the sun soaking into your shirt, warming your back. Soft ripples of water lapping against the side of the canoe, gently pushing you this way and that… quietly, softly, like dreaming. This was the perfect way to end the summer.

    I still have some more highlights of the trip that I want to write about but I just wanted to post this before I forgot about it.

  • Family Matters,  Life Lessons,  Moody Blues

    No camp for us

    ancient saguaro

    Sigh. My mom is taking my niece Rapunzel up north to a Bible camp in the mountains that I used to attend when I was a teenager. It’s the last year that this camp is going to be held there (the amazing hosts are retiring) and it hurts me that I can’t join them.

    I was going to join them. Bug and I were all excited about going “camping.” I couldn’t wait to show her all the things that I remember so fondly from that camp but…it just didn’t work out. There were a few key variables (time, money, a blessing from Toby) that, no matter how we reworked the plans, just weren’t happening.

    I could have squeezed it together, borrowed some funds from overdraft (nothing new to me) and probably made it work but I’ve done that too many times. I’ve come to the point in my life where I’m realizing that wanting something really bad isn’t always enough to make it work. I’ve forced trips like this before and come home regretting them.

    So we’re not going. It makes me sad. My mom is packing up her SUV (in between about a thousand phone calls from my Dad) as I type this and I know that if I were going I could help her in so many ways. But it just wasn’t meant to be. We’re staying home and having a nice little Fourth-of-July celebration with Toby, just us three. It will be okay.