That's My Bix!

Once a year, Esteban and his dad go camping with a bunch of our friends. Our male friends. I won’t even go into the reason why this is an all male weekend — well, I may if you and I ever find ourselves in a dark corner of a very loud club where I’d be happy to indulge your curiosity — but it makes them happy.

And that makes ME happy.

Esteban’s mom, June, and I have our own little weekend in their absence. We don’t “camp” per se– but we do a lot of swimming, eating and sitting around doing fuck all, so other than the lack of mosquitoes and chiggers, it’s EXACTLY like their weekend. Only we don’t rent a camper or drive four hours north to do it.

Sometimes our friends take that opportunity to visit and hang out with us, too, which is always extra awesome. So we drink all the wines, and also margaritas and sweet tea vodka mixers, and eat pretty much 10,000 calories a day.

It’s a good time, as you can imagine.

Also, we don’t discriminate by gender.

Zuzu’s condition, unfortunately, prevents us from doing any significant day tripping — Zuzu now requires a mid day dosing of her medication as well as the typical morning and before bed doses. I really don’t feel comfortable leaving her at boarding, where she could be having a seizure in some dog run without anyone realizing it.

So we hang close to home base, hit the farmer’s markets, go vintage furniture hunting and in general, do whatever whim strikes us at the moment. We decided the theme of the weekend was “follow your bliss”. I believe all of us managed to follow our bliss into a nap at some point during the weekend, so personally? That’s a damn fine weekend right there.

Did I mention the wine? Because there was wine.

(And sometimes when we had no more wine to drink, we drank Not Wine.)

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been over a year since I “ended my relationship” with my previous employer and hung out my own shingle. It’s still a bit of a mental transition to take vacation days. I don’t have to clear it with anyone, but I find myself declaring that I will be on vacation, but then still too worried about disappointing a client to actually stick to it. I managed to be “on vacation” without really impacting any of my clients, except for the ones that still owe me money for work I did months and months ago, so I don’t feel too bad about shutting off the firehose of awesome for a few days there. Still, it’s a weird feeling, knowing that emails were coming in and I don’t have any co-workers to pick up the slack and deal with it.

And so we beat on. Esteban had a fantastic time at his camping trip and came back smelly and with a million bags to unpack. Our friends went home. I have a ton of laundry to do, but other than that, we’re back to even keel. Until then, I have these awesome memories and images to remind me that sometimes quiet time is pretty damn important too.