Vacation and all...

As many, many of you were very kind to point out, I haven't written in a while. I was away and I'm having my laptop fixed so I've not had a whole lot of opportunity. But now, home again, I write.

Let's see, I worked last weekend and it was pretty much no great shakes. But the wife and I DID go to see her sister Katie and the ever-popular brother-in-law Pat. We always look forward to seeing them and it was a swell as ever. Katie and Pat, henceforth KP, made us a fantastic dinner of corn, shish kabob, marinated chicken, brochettes, all sorts of swell stuff. I ate till I was a little embarrassed with myself. I drank an awful lot, too. I've been on a, "Gimme a little bit of everything..." kick in my drinking, wine, margaritas and beer on the night in question. I got a little looped, but the wife got a bit more. By morning she was in pain and we had a slow start getting back. We played Trivial Pursuit, where KP's frightening knowledge, and the fact that I continually made guesses without consulting the wife, or indeed, thinking, led directly to a loss. But then we played Pictionary and it was a close thing, would the game end before KP's marriage? So we stopped playing that and went to sleep.

I got my orders that day, too. I'm leaving the whole lot of you, in October. I'll be gone for a couple of months, then swing round to grab up my long-suffering, ever-lovin' wife and be on our way to Japan. With any luck I'll get through the Marine training in the minimum 7 weeks and be able to take the month of leave that they say I can get. That way M and I will be able to pop in on a few of our faithful readers, to say goodbye before our long sojourn in the mysterious East.

Lots and lots of nothing much then over that weekend, like I said, work. Then on Sunday we packed up and left for Rehoboth Beach, DE. Now, I've never been to the Atlantic during the beach season, but it's something to be seen. We drove in a constant stream of traffic, despite a cold blatter of rain, the entire way. The traffic was like a queue at an amusement park, but for 2.5 hours. Once I realized that it would never clear up, I started to get apprehensive. It seemed that we would be spending the week of our vacation in the rain, with 2 million strangers that all wanted to be standing where we were standing. Not the most comfortable thought. But, since it DID manage to rain almost all weekend, it was kind of nice. There weren't a lot of people at the beach, though where they were is a bit mysterious. M and I had a fantastic time, though. Sunday evening we spent waiting for our hotel room to open up. Then we went down to the beach, got far more wet than we'd planned and ran back to the hotel. Dinner, sleep, a 100% successful day.

More later... I'm back, I promise.