Note to Self: How to Vacate the Premises, Part II

If you are a person who knows me personally and sees me in person from time to time, please punch me in the face the next time you see me. I deserve it, and it's the only way I'm ever going to learn.

Some of you may recall that I wrote a blog post LIKE, A MONTH AGO in which I outlined all the things that are absolutely imperative to guarantee a good vacation. You MUST get the hell out of town! There MUST be a housekeeping staff! You can NOT travel with your family! These aren't just suggestions; they are incontrovertible scientific truths, like the law of gravity and the fact that only guys I'm *not* attracted to will ever want me! Ignoring these facts is just ASKING to be tortured.

So what did I do?

Well, last Wednesday, I had this conversation with my boss:
BOSS: Man, you're gonna bust your butt this week and then not have anything to do til mid-September!
ME: Hey, you're right. (PAUSE) I'd like next week off, please.
...and then Bikinius, Roman Goddess of Summer Vacays, came down from the heavens and beat me senseless with an inflatable pool toy before stabbing me repeatedly with a decorative plastic cocktail garnish sword. Because I had done it a-flipping-gain.

My brilliant (<--SARCASM!) plan was that I would have Monday thru Wednesday to write, clean up, and relax. Then I'd go to the beach with my parents Wednesday evening and be back on Saturday night, in time to do more writing/cleaning/relaxing over the last half of Labor Day weekend. If you read that other blog post, you'll remember what I said about "staycations" - mainly that they do not exist. If you are at home, you are not on vacation. Period. I said that if you stay home, a hundred bizarre misfortunes will befall you and you will not enjoy one second of it.

So yesterday the new cat sitter was coming over. And rather than give her the impression that my entire home is one big experiment in composting, I decided to clean up. This meant 4 hours of frantic cleaning, scrubbing, folding, sweeping, dusting, etc. By the time she came over, the place was passable. Also, I had injured my back in the process. Badly. We'll call this FAIL #1.

So I spent the rest of the BEAUTIFUL afternoon laying on the couch atop a carefully constructed mountain of pillows and blankets designed for maximum padding of the hurtiest part of my back with an electric hand warmer shoved up the back of my bra for want of a hot water bottle. Livin' the dream. I had done such a good job of engineering my Back Bracing Blankets that I started to think I should just sleep on the couch! I decided I felt like watching something educational, which is how I ended up falling asleep watching a documentary about the Nürnberg Trials. Here's some advice you can have for free: Never, EVER, fall asleep watching ANYTHING holocaust-related. FAIL #2.  When I woke up screaming (and having fallen off my Back Bracing Blankets in the course of fighting the Nazis), I decided maybe I should go to bed after all. And with the aid of powerful narcotics, that's exactly what I did.

This morning I awoke to the news that I will be without a car for most of the next 48 hours, so I and my bad back needed to get the hell up and go shop for supplies. I'm not exactly what you would call a "morning person" anyway, and this news was not helping. Still, I was determined to make the best of it! The shopping itself was pretty uneventful, but on the 5-minute drive home, I had this experience, in this order:
1. A guy in an SUV made a U-turn the wrong way down a one-way street, which meant he was coming directly toward me. I stopped, he realized he was going the wrong way, and started to back up.
2. A guy on a motorcycle going WAY too fast came flying up behind the SUV and just managed to stop before hitting him.
3. When SUV guy reached the bottom of the hill ahead of me, he stopped and did a weird maneuver into another lane. As I approached the bottom of the hill myself, I realized why...
4. A woman in a minivan was slowly and determinedly attempting to make her way up the hill...going the wrong way up a one-way street. Right at me.
For those of you counting at home, that's two narrowly-missed head-on collisions and the near-witnessing of a dead motorcyclist...in a 5-minute drive. I MUST be on a staycation! FAIL #3.

I have to admit, things have been better since I got back home. I mean, I had 2 bowls of Frosted Flakes, so how bad can it be? But I did lose 2 hours searching things like "gothic tiny person creature" trying to get the internet to remind me of a word I had forgotten ("Homunculus"), so it's still kind of a mixed bag.