Vacation Video Highlights
Okay, now I swear we’re done with vacation stuff.
Probably.
I hear the Weekend Roundup a-comin’, it’s comin’ round the bend
After a week of nothing but vacation-related posts, I realize that you’re probably getting sick of all the vacation stuff. Well, good news! Now that we’ve been back in the real world for a solid week now, I’m almost done with reliving our time at Table Rock over and over again. Only one more vacation post to go, and that’s a YouTube highlight video that’s coming tomorrow.
I was up until about 1 a.m. Saturday morning working on that particular video. I don’t know why I was so bent on getting the thing done. There was no real hurry; it’s not like Old Lady Horn was breathing down my neck and crowing about a deadline or something. But the way I figure it, if I didn’t get it done this weekend, I’d forget how everything went down on vacation and everything would be out of order and I would be so discouraged that I would just give up and probably just erase all the files and none of us would remember that the vacation never even happened. So you see, I had to do it, you see.
Even though working on the thing meant that I spent all Friday evening ignoring my family and Tom (of course he was over there–surprised?) as they debated whether to a) watch The Secret of NIMH with the kiddies, or 2) wait until the kiddies went to bed and watch L.A. Confidential, or III) do neither, and just waste time watching an old Simpsons episode while Tom falls asleep in the recliner. Guess which came out on top?
Saturday was a day for housecleaning: toilets were scrubbed and floors were vacuumed and dust was rousted from its resting place on every horizontal surface of the house. Or so I hear, anyway. I left after breakfast to go see The Dark Knight with a bunch of friends from church. And let me tell you… it’s an incredible movie, as intense and visceral and disturbing as any movie I’ve seen in a long time. There were moments where my gut was clenched in dread, and I’m nearly 40 years old. I can’t imagine how the five-tear-old kids in the audience were taking it. Honestly, had their parents done any research on this movie at all? “Well, it’s a Batman movie,” I imagine them saying. “The kids will love it!” Enjoy those sweat-soaked nightmares, kiddies!
Anyway, I eventually made it home and made myself useful cutting the grass and performing general housecleanery duties. We were tidying the place up in advance of a little soiree Saturday evening. We (and by “we,” I mean, of course, “Shannon”) invited twenty-or-so people over to the house for brats and burgers and some low-key hangin’ out. Thing is, while our domicile is larger than the cramped, one-bedroom campus apartments that we lived in for the first several years of our marriage, as houses go it’s not really all that big. And so it can get a little tight when that many people show up, especially when they all congregate in one room.
So yeah, our wee house was a wee bit crowded. Nonetheless, no one was complaining about the cramped quarters. They were too busy laughing and shouting and shoving bratwursts down their gullets.
We stayed up late Saturday night getting the house back into fighting shape, so Sunday we didn’t have to worry about the typical Sunday getting-ready-for-the-week-to-come activities. That left us free to take long, deep, head-clearing naps and then take the kids to the pool. (No, I mean, literally taking our kids to the pool. I’m not using the phrase in its scatological sense.) Maya’s friend Mackenzie King and her mom joined us at the pool for Coppertone-scented, sun-soaked splashitude and then some wicked awesome Minsky’s pizza afterward.
Here’s the thing… we had a really nice vacation, an entire week free of obligation. We slept late, ate junk, and did pretty much whatever we wanted. It was hard to come back to our workaday responsibilities in Kansas City, and to tell the truth, we were pretty bummed much of the week. But this weekend was just what we needed. It helped us to remember that while time away is an important part of life, time spent laughing and eating and hanging out with friends and family… that is life. And a pretty decent life, at that.
Vacation Photos Aplenty
I’ve been doling out vacation photos one at a time over the past week. Nuts to that! Here’s a whole bunch of ‘em.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/26
Sunset on the lake, just behind the lakehouse.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/25
Yeah, the water was a little high at the Table Rock Lake State Park Marina.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/24
Raising sails on the Spirit of American swim cruise, Table Rock Lake.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/23
Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf, Branson, Mo.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/22
Disturbing on so many levels. Outside Mickey’s in Branson West, Mo.
Vacation Photo of the Day, 7/21
Boating (and clowning around) on Table Rock Lake.
Vacation Roundup 2008
While Mr. Horn will WOW you with his photo and video footage of our vacation, I’ll give you the not-so-condensed version of our vacation. So grab your favorite beverage, a cozy chair and prepare for a lot of info about our last week at Table Rock Lake.