Pre-Maui

There are moments you remember all your life. There are moments you wait for and dream of all your life. This is one of those moments....

I am sorry for being all Yentl and Martha Stewart about this at the same time, but this is one of those moments.

Yes, it’s that glorious, glorious moment, when you walk out of work and realize you are on vacation for the next ten days. Everything slows down for a second and you smile with a sudden sense of freedom, of joy, of knowing you will be flying first class and drinking champagne and enjoying lumbar support soon…..it’s a good thing.

This time it’s a bit more freeing than usual. No more direct reports with their annoying vacations requests and stupid major surgeries and little personal life dramas, no more HR, no more four hour finance calls. Acting Manager, having been extended five times, is back to being a Project Manager for a while… but making way more money and the carrot of international travel dangling in front of me. Guess the last eight months worked out OK.

As I am walking to the car suddenly I hear music in my head...it's lush...dreamy...Britpop?....

...don’t know where I end and where you begin don’t know where I end and where you begin don’t know where I end...

Yep, that song is all about you and me, my darling. I have been away for two and half years. How can that be? Here is how:

• Maui ,Christmas 2007

• O’ahu , May 2008

• Provence and Paris, September 2008

• The stupid Big Island, March 2009

• O’ahu, May 2009

• Paris, December 2009

• Now, finally, finally, Maui, May 2010.

I am coming home my love. Well, my spiritual home...if I had a spirit...or if I could afford to live on you....

What was that Maui? You say there was a brief flirtation last year? Yes, this is true. I landed on your glorious shores last March en route home from the stupid Big Island. It was the best part of the whole trip. Stupid Big Island with its giant centipedes and my father constantly barging into my bedroom. So much drama.

This trip could be fraught with drama also. Lynnette, Marie, Chris, Angela, and Michelle are all joining me and Mark. If any one of them gets between me and you, Maui, I will kill them immediately. But let’s not assume the worst, my darling. Everything will be fine. Right? How can it not be when I am on the best place on earth.

More later....

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So my parents are house sitting for the week. As such I need to clean. This will need to be a deep, meaningful, paiful clean. I have not cleaned like this since the last time they stayed here….over a year ago.

To start I have to pick of every article of clothing off the floor of my closet. When things are good – meaning when I am psychologically stable - I take clean clothes out of the drier and hang them up. I am never psychologically stable however, so clothes almost always go from the drier to a pile on the ironing board, then when that gets too big I just dump them on the floor in my closet and close the door. To be fair though, my walk in closet is the size of one of those apartments you seen in Prague on House Hunters International.

I opened to closet door to find clean clothes two feet thick, no floor space visible. Two hours later I had visible floor, hung up clothes, and a nice pile of things to donate to Goodwill.

Next came the carpets. Oh the joy of having cats in a house with light carpeting. Towards the end of his life, Cathead had some…challenges…with body fluid leakage. Now it’s not like I didn’t clean these things up as they happened, but there is cumulative damage over time.

Then there is Fred. Fred should be renamed to Vomitas. He just spews hair balls nonstop from February through June. I have him on anti spew cat food, and knowing I was going to steam clear the carpet today, I gave him an especially large dose of this special anti spew liquid for cats. I think basically it is brown meat flavored Vaseline, but I don’t really want to know. He actually likes it. He likes regular flavored Vasoline too.

I spent all day yesterday steam cleaning my carpeting. I had to do the stairs by hand with a special mini steam wand.
This morning I woke up to find a giant hair ball and most of last night’s cat dinner fused into the carpet in my guest bedroom. Fuck! Unbelieving, I went to get some coffee and to go read the news on my computer in my office. Fred then came into my office and started to scream. He always screams before he yaks up a big one. Fred screams, then I scream. My screaming scares him so he takes off running right as the vomit starts to come out. He leaves a long trail of orange cat food spew from my office to my landing and then onto the stairs that I cleaned by hand yesterday for hours.

So we redid the carpets again.

Then I moved the lawn.

Then I vacuumed downstairs.

Then I Swiffer Wet-jetted the downstairs floors.

Then I Windexed the windows.

I am exhausted.

I need a vacation now.

More later……





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