Burn, Philip Morris! Burn!

Sorry for the long absence, but I grew up in a polygamist sect and I had this little court thing to attend. You’re right, incredibly insensitive of me. Especially when the truth is that I’m just lazy.

So, much has transpired since my last pseudo-post before the big end-of-summer holiday. For one, I spent Labor Day weekend at the beach. That’s right, the beach! And I know what you’re thinking, what kind of fool goes to the beach on Labor Day weekend? Isn’t it just full of all those amateur vacationers trying to squeeze a few moments of desperate fun/relaxation out of the last bits of summertime? Isn’t it crowded and noisy and just entirely unpleasant?

Hah! I say. First of all I say this because my last vacation was almost two years ago: I traveled to Iowa to spend a week with my son over his spring break. In March. In Iowa. Iowa. Let me recap: I traveled from Virginia, where the average temperature nears sixty degrees in March, to Iowa, where it is known to snow well into April. The weather did not disappoint that year, and while the folks back here in ol’ Virginny were enjoying days spent reading under early-blooming dogwoods, I was enduring a full-on blizzard, a term which, by the way, was first used by an Iowa newspaper to describe and Iowa snowstorm sometime in the nineteenth century. That was my last vacation.

The friends with whom I spent this summer, seeing how much I’d been working lately, insisted I come along with them for their weekend at the beach, and though at first I balked – I really should have been moving in to my new apartment, not to mention I missed out on a Friday night shift at the restaurant and my son was flying back on Labor Day – they convinced me that a free (did I mention they were paying for everything?) weekend at the beach was deserved by me.

So I went. And for three wonderful nights I got my own room in their suite, complete with surfside balcony and privileges on their oceanfront balcony. We played in the ocean with their kids, we flew kites, we ate at all their favorite restaurants (including one really plush one overlooking the sound), we took afternoon naps with the balcony doors open, and I sat in the hot tub and took a sunrise stroll along the near-deserted beach. That’s right, I said deserted. See, we skipped the commercial, big-resort, boardwalk baloney of Virginia Beach and instead headed to the Outer Banks. And I have to say, for Labor Day weekend, it was under-crowded.

Of course, all of that joy and wonderfulness came to a too abrupt end, and I had to be back in the RIC Monday evening to pick the kid up at the airport and then rush off to my evening shift at the restaurant. Of course, I didn’t realize I would have to go through the gate to pick up the unaccompanied minor, and I had a purse full of lighters. Now I know that last statement makes me sound a bit sketchy, but allow me to explain. I lose things. All kinds of things. Especially the kinds of things that can be stuffed into pants pockets and apron pockets and purse pockets and you get the idea. So I am constantly leaving the 7-Eleven in the morning with my nicotine, only to discover that I’ve left my lighter on the windowsill at home or the pants I wore last night. Consequently, I end up owning at any given time between five and ten lighters.

And since the friends I was staying with have two adorable little girls, impressionable little girls, I had to be very careful not to leave any such dangerous flame-producing tools lying around, and all of them (the Bics, not the girls) ended up in the bag I was carrying all weekend at the beach and then to the airport, where I had to go through the stupid security checkpoint to pick up the kid, and where I had to pause to throw out six cigarette lighters from the bottom of said bag. The scary thing is, when I got to work later and was digging through the bag for a pen, I found a lighter I had missed. A lighter the Transportation Security Administration workers and their high-tech bag x-raying machine had also missed.

So, as payback for enjoying myself for a few days, last week was incredibly busy with work and moving in to the new place and work and registering the kid for school and shopping for furniture at thrift stores (okay, that was fun) and turning on utilities and more work. Then Sunday I came down with a cold, which turned out not to be a cold, but the bronchitis and all I have to say to that is, “Screw the bronchitis!” Okay, in an email to a friend earlier, I used the F-bomb, but I’m practicing restraint. I’m trying anyway.

And the worst part of it is, and you all knew this was coming, I have to give up smoking.

Fuck giving up smoking!

I said I was trying.

Stupid pulmonary inflammations!

So I spent much of this week, sitting in my half-furnished, half-moved into, entirely unpacked apartment, staring at undecorated walls and the kid’s sour mug, and praying for the Philip Morris plant on the south side of town to catch fire and send tobacco smoke spewing into the air and for a freak wind to blow it north west over my apartment. Not that I would be able to inhale anyway with all the hacking and wheezing I was doing. But a TSA bypassing girl like me can dream.