I'm baaaaaack....

(Umm... you DID notice I was gone... didn't you??)

I've been away for the past two weeks, visiting my parents. Happily, although dh is heading back to work tomorrow (today is a civic holiday in Ontario, and many other Canadian provinces), I have another week of vacation still to go. : ) By the time I head back to work on Aug. 11th, I will have been away three (count 'em) weeks.

As I tell everyone, I can't remember the last time I had three weeks off in a row. Actually I do remember -- I was off work for eight weeks after Katie was stillborn, 11 (eek) years ago this very week. But I don't consider that time as "vacation." (Although some people apparently do. Dh took three weeks off -- we originally had two of them scheduled as vacation. When he returned to work, he was told bereavement leave was officially three days, but they would let him take a week... the two weeks of vacation would still count as vacation. Some "vacation," huh??)

I am hoping to get some cleaning/organizing done around the house, indulge a day or two in some scrapbooking, and perhaps do a blog cleanup (my blogroll & some of the links in the sidebar are sadly outdated). And catch up on some blog writing, reading and commenting. My parents have a computer & Internet access, and while I tried to do a little reading & commenting every day, I was forever being interrupted ("Turn that noisy computer off, your father is trying to nap"... "You spend too much time on that thing"... "Would you come help me with..." etc. etc.) I currently have more than 400 unread posts in my reader, and try as I might while I was away, I never managed to get it down to fewer than 200.

Watch for potential upcoming posts on the following topics (among others):

• my mother, her recent 50th class reunion & her sarcastic comment after a phone conversation with my uncle;
• cleaning out the crawl space (well, a big chunk of it, anyway) under my parents' house and the treasures (& junk) we found;
• Katie's upcoming "anniversary" dates later this week;
• assorted great articles that I've read & thought "I should blog about that;"
• the five (count 'em!) books I read in the two weeks I was away (including "Moose" by Stephanie Klein, the next Barren B*tches Book Tour selection).

More to come soon...