LifePundit

The Cheapest Man in America Gets Romantic

I think I'm married. Paul continues to turn up after late nights finishing his office renovation. We haven't been away together alone since 2000. It's been a hard several months, so we really do need to have some time together. Alone.

So I was thrilled when Paul asked me if I would go with him on a week-long cruise to the Bahamas (I've never been there so it's time I went) on the Norwegian Majesty (pictured). The thing I love about cruises is that you absolutely have to unplug. You have to relax whether you want to or not. No Internet. No news (except what they let dribble through the room TV). No phone. (Yes, you can get these things but they cost extra and I really don't want them -- I'd pay not to have them for a week.) No man sitting at family supper using his laptop. A romantic week alone -- we've never needed it so badly.

And the price of cruises right now is almost less expensive than staying at home! Go look. I wonder for that price if we're supposed to bring our own sheets, towels and food?

Saintly Brother and his almost saintly wife have agreed to let Lily stay with them. I'm all set for our romantic cruise at the end of January. Time alone. What will that be like?

Then we have this conversation:

Paul: It's all set and Mark can go.

(Note: Mark is Paul's favorite client. I like him, too, and we have vacationed together before.)

Me: Mark can go where?

Paul: On the cruise with us.

Me: But I thought it was a romantic get away for just the two of us!?!

Paul: This way I can expense the trip.

He had already invited Mark! On our romantic cruise! Without asking/telling me!

Me: But then it's not a romantic trip with just the two of us.

Paul: We'll have a private room. I thought you liked Mark.

Me: Yes, but that changes everything!

I'm not sure that Paul every really understood the problem I had with this because to him it was just such a good idea -- bring a fun client and expense the whole thing. But to his credit, he re-arranged things and will be taking Mark on a later trip.

There is such a thing as being too frugal.

This is so awful it's funny. But we will have fun. Paul is cheap, but he is fun.

Merry Christmas!

An Excellent Adventure

I've got a cold and I'm waiting for the tranquilizer I gave the cat, Tiger, to take effect so that I can take him to the vet. Tiger was diagnosed with diabetes last week and I've been giving him insulin shots twice a day, which has been easier than I've expected. But today Tiger needs to have his blood drawn, and if I take him to the vet unmedicated, the only blood drawn will belong to the vet. Tiger has a massive personality change just by entering the vet clinic.

When my niece (who is a vet) used to give him his shots here at our house, he wouldn't bother to get up and would purr the whole time. Take him to the vet and they have to put him in a gas chamber. He has a big orange sticker on his file and you can hear him screaming from miles away even though nobody has touched him. He's so awful that it's funny. Unless it's your hide he peels off.

So, since my life is not worth telling about right now, you need to go visit my friend Joe's new blog, An Excellent Adventure. Joe is a retired FBI agent living as the "trailing spouse" while his wife, Melanie, works for the State Department in Tajikistan. They've chosen an interesting path through life, but I mainly think they're trying to get far enough away so we won't come visit.

I'd tell you all about Joe's adventures in the FBI, all the places they've lived and the interesting things that they've done, but then he'd have to kill me.

Go visit Joe and tell him I sent you.

Sick Kids and Field Trips

The bus taking the eighth graders on their much anticipated field trip to Washington, D.C., just left. Lily's not on it. She caught a bad cold on the church retreat over the weekend.

She's a healthy girl who rarely gets sick. But she gets sick every time she goes on a field trip. It's partly a matter of not enough sleep (there's not even eight hours scheduled for sleep on these trips), getting run down and getting exposed to the sick kids on the trip. Because there are always sick kids on the trip.

I agonized all yesterday and last night over whether or not to send Lily. If sh'es just got a cold, she could power through. But what if it's the early stage of something else, and she gets worse?

And whatever it is, who else might catch it?

I was surprised to find myself rationalizing all the reasons that Lily should go anyway. I was surprised because every time she comes home sick from a field trip and tells me that so-and-so was on the trip and was sick from the moment she got on the bus and sneezed on everybody, I feel like calling so-and-so's mama and asking her just what was she thinking to send a sick kid on a trip? It can't have been fun for the kid, and it's sure not fun for the rest of the  now sick kids.

When Lily was in private school she went on a field trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, that was nearly a week long. A doctor's daughter got on the bus sick. And by the end of the field trip, one-quarter of the children were sick. At least one-quarter. And one-quarter of these kids missed the next full week of school. I know this is unusual, but one of the children developed lung-scarring and missed part of the next year of school as well!

Lily is still talking about how awful it was to be sick and to be marched all over Williamsburg. Not the memory we were hoping for.

But even with those experiences behind me, I tried to rationalize a way it would be all right to send Lily. Oh, she's probably not contagious. Probably all of them have colds. She'll feel fine by tomorrow and can just rest on the bus. We don't want her to miss anything. And for goodness sakes, we've paid our money which we probably can't get back!

But Lily was so droopy this morning. No fever but not well. I didn't have the heart.

I called the lead teacher to tell her that Lily wouldn't be going. And although I heard disappointment in the teacher's voice, I heard something else: Relief! She said that two other sick girls were going and she was worried about them. They've been sick with something and had been running fevers. I could tell the teacher was concerned that they weren't as well as their mothers thought or claimed.

The group is going to be walking a lot in what we consider cold weather. They're going to be walking all day. That's not how you get over being sick. The lead teacher said that Lily would be miserable, and I'm sure that's true. Unless she suddenly gets well tomorrow. Oh well. That is life.

I'm surprised that the two other sick girls are going. And I'm even more surprised with what mental gyrations I was willing to perform in order to justify sending Lily, too. I was going to use the time alone this week to power through NaNaWriMo.

And I'm glad that the child is in bed, getting better (I hope). That's where she needs to be.

Even though I'm not happy about an Obama administration coming in, I do expect that Washington will still be there later and available for exploration.

Lion Cubs on Display at Our Zoo

Our zoo just put "our" lion cubs, born last June, on display this week. Four frolicking cubs! Too cute for reality. I can't wait to see them. To see more photos, go here.

We might have more than our share of rednecks, heart disease (#1 in the country -- I'm so proud) and alligators, but we have an extremely wonderful zoo and botanical garden -- Riverbanks.

We also have some wonderful fiction writers. And this is really a great place to live, especially this time of year. Sunny and low 70s right now. How hard it is to work when I could go out in this weather and see those lion cubs.

Maybe that will be my reward for after NaNoWriMo.

She Who Hesitates is Lost

I got invited to India before Paul checked out the travel costs. Did you know that a first-class ticket to India is $14,000? He's not going first class and I'm not going at all. I think if I had flung myself into the whole adventure, had run off to the health department to get my shots and had not asked repeatedly, "Are you sure it's going to be clean and nice like Epcot?" that I probably would not have gotten myself dis- invited.

I'm not great in crowds. I dislike football games for that reason, and also because I really hate football. And I'm a bumpkin kind of tourist, forgetting to watch where I'm going while marveling at the sights. I trust everybody. I have an open kind of face that attracts crazy people. And I try to help them, because I fail to notice that they are crazy. I don't look like I know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I look like a target. Or so Paul tells me.

And then, I'm funny about food. In fact, if I weren't so squeamish and high maintenance about eating at places in St. Martin where there were more flies than people and the "refrigerate after opening" condiments weren't sitting out in 95 degree heat in the sunshine (translation: can't eat there), I probably wouldn't have gotten the, "I think I'd be too worried about whether or not you were having fun to work," discussion. Yes, I'm afraid I'm not the sort you can drop just anywhere and I'll be fine. I'll be fine, but I probably won't eat. (This could be a good weight-loss strategy.) And I have the gift for making everyone with me just as squeamish as I am.

I love Indian food and cook it quite a bit. (One of my favorite cookbooks is Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.) But when it comes to eating it, I need to know what's in it? (My new experiment is with Moroccan cooking -- absolutely delicious. I'll post on that later, once I've gotten the turmeric stains out of my fingernails....)

When we used to go to China Town in Philadelphia, I loved absolutely everything until one day we went to Dim Sum. There were no menus in English. Nobody could tell me what things were on that little cart with all the dishes, but the things I could recognize were chicken feet and duck feet. Nope. If that's what I can recognize, who knows about the things I've never seen before.

I feel a need to apologize for all of this. But I can't help it.

When my sweet mother, child of the Depression, would cook the squirrels that my father and brother would kill, I would skip supper. I didn't eat my grandmother's famous liver mush (what a name!) and in fact couldn't be in the house while it was cooking. I don't eat frogs, though I have eaten snails just because they were a vehicle for garlic. I won't eat goat, prefer not to eat lamb, and wouldn't dream of eating a rabbit. I've eaten Bambi to be polite. I've got a narrow view of what's edible in the animal kingdom. Vegetables and spices are no problem at all.

So what makes this so silly is that I'd probably really enjoy the vegetarian dishes in India. Maybe next time.

In the meantime, we're going to try for a romantic weekend getaway. I have no idea what that would be like.

Should I Go to Bangalore, India?

I have to make a quick decision. I have a chance to go to Bangalore, India, for a week. No other travel around India. Just Bangalore. Paul will be working intensely and probably under stress. I will be ....doing what? I have no idea.

Have you been? Do you know anyone who's been? Should I run down, get all my shots (!!!), pick up my malaria medicine and Cipro and hop on that plane? (And farm Lily out somewhere for while we're gone.)

My inclination is to wait and go on Paul's next trip, for when he might have more time to travel around and sightsee and be with me. And I might have more time to rearrange my schedule (including a writer's conference I was planning to attend). But there might not be a next trip.

Opinions? Suggestions?

Where Would You Go If You Could Go Anywhere?

The other day Paul asked me how I would live differently if I knew I only had six months to live. I started on the usual "getting my affairs in order" sort of drivel when he stopped me. "No," he said. "What would you do if you did what you really wanted to?"

Well, it certainly wouldn't be getting my affairs in order. I doubt I could even do that in six months. I was surprised at how easy the real answer was. "I'd go on a cruise around the Greek islands. One of those cruises where they have college professors on board who'd tell me everything about what I was seeing, and really make things come alive. And I'd want to spend some time on a beach and snorkeling, too," I said. "And I'd like to dance, some Greek dance I don't know."

"Okay," he said. "That won't take all six months. What else would you do?"

"Go on a Holy Land tour," I said. We nearly booked just such a trip led by a very spiritual and gifted pastor a few years ago, but then people started shooting at each other (again) in that region and the trip got called off. "But if I only had six months to live, it wouldn't matter if I got killed in Jerusalem. That would be the perfect time to go."

I'm not sure where the conversation got us, because there's certainly been no booking of a trip to Greece or even a trip to the local Greek restaurant. But it did get me to remember how very much I like to travel.

I used to use a travel agent for my trips. But she's gone -- and I get a little lost when I try to figure out how to get the best deal on airfare using all the web sites that promise discounted tickets. Then I found this easy-to-use web site that incorporates and compares Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity -- all the web sites that I use to try to figure out how to get where I'm going and save money, too. If you're planning a trip, either domestically or internationally, you might want look into Cheap airline tickets.

The Old Goat Eats Goat

Okay, you're on an island that's supposed to have the best restaurants in the Caribbean. So what do you do? If you're my husband, you go to a seaside cafe in Phillipsburg and.... you order GOAT for lunch.

Some things you just aren't supposed to eat. No wonder they're all in a tree.

more cat pictures

The Vacation is Over

I'm back -- and kind of sorry about it.

The switch on our water pump had a problem so we had no water. Now it's back -- and I'm back to doing laundry. A working well and water pump is one of the world's greatest inventions.

The lightning that gave me technical problems before vacation did something to my computer and my speakers and printer quit working. The lights were on but nobody was home. Finally, late last night, I got it working again. Had to uninstall a bunch of stuff and re-install, plus had to use different USB ports. I think the lightning got some of my USB ports. Now I have wires going everywhere and am beginning to feel like Medusa.

And then nobody remembered how to hook the TV back up to all the wires and boxes (since we unplugged everything before we left). I've about had it with wires and boxes.

The vet is coming to see the horses this afternoon. One injured an ankle while we were gone and the other caught a cough. Ah me.

And my father fell, but he's okay.

I'll post pictures and write up a little about our trip to St. Maarten/St. Martin. It's a beautiful place, no hotter than here, and I didn't have any wires or livestock to concern myself with.

And to think we could have stayed two weeks!

I'm Back

I should have told you I'd be silent for a while because I was going on vacation. Actually, what I usually do is compose my posts in advance and let them roll out while I'm gone. Between the lightning damage, work deadlines and old people who keep falling (but are okay), I barely got myself packed and out of here.

I unplugged absolutely everything before I left so no lightning damage. The only adventure was that the sheriff's department called Saintly Brother to tell him that one of our doors was unlocked and he had to come over to check out things.

Bless the sheriff. Bless Saintly Brother. Saintly Brother said he didn't think the door had ever been locked....

We have seven exterior doors. This is what happens when you build your own house and the local building supply place lets you buy their display doors (gorgeous) for practically nothing. We have doors where we were supposed to have windows. Trouble is, we forget to lock them all. Oops!

We went to St. Maarten/St. Martin and had a wonderful, restful time.

The indoor cat can't get enough of me now. How she missed me! I love being loved.

I'll be posting photos and stories later. Paul ate curried goat. I think that is just wrong. We had goats as pets when I was little. You don't eat pets, though chevre and feta are sublime.

Paul's suitcase still hasn't arrived, we have no food in the house (other than cat food), I need to pick up the horses and I'll download photos, etc. later.

Travel is a great pleasure. So is getting home!