George Carlin is basically the patron saint of Freedom to Read Week as far as I’m concerned. I’m technically in Mexico right now but due to the magic of time-delayed posts, I’ll use his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” as inspiration for this week’s posts.
Anyhow, at this time tomorrow night, we should be just nicely arrived at our resort so I thought I’d leave off with a few last thoughts as I’m not sure how much I’ll be online the next week (we’re in the basic rooms so likely won’t have Internet unless we’re fortunate enough to have a room close to the lobby or pools or other areas that have wifi.)
It’s weird that all of the anticipation of a trip, the research, the calendar moving closer actually sort of gives me a bit of a melancholy feeling when the trip finally arrives. Now, don’t get me wrong – this feeling will be gone with the adrenaline rush tomorrow of getting to the airport for what is always a long travel day but knowing it will be capped by humid tropical air and a margarita (or dos.)
I started using a Google Spreadsheet template to track my weight before our trip last January. It’s got a rolling 1o-day average so it helps you to not focus on day-to-day fluctuations but longer term trends. I’ve had periods where I was good about eating healthy and times where it was Christmas. But I’m going into this trip about 10 lbs over my goal weight and 3lbs over what I weighed for our trip last year. (I’ll blame that on basically throwing any “diet” out the window the past week or so – beer, junk food, etc.)
At the same time, even though I’m heavier than I hoped to be, I’m literally less than one pound over my all-time average weight for the past year plus that I’ve been tracking my weight and still 20-30 pounds less than I was at my all-time heaviest.
Did I ever mention that this is the first all-inclusive I’ve been to where a week doesn’t feel like it’ll be long enough? So much to do right on site.
That also means that, depending on how our week goes, this might be the first resort that I ever have any desire to go back to (but at the same time, there are more resorts than anyone could visit in a lifetime so it’s always nice to try somewhere new.)
I may or may not have taken screen caps of a bunch of tropical drink recipes and put them on my phone for ease of requesting from the bartenders! 😉
It’s hard to say what I’m most excited for on this trip but I think being in a resort where I’m likely to see *real* monkeys in the wild (as opposed to Sasha who’s a monkey of a different type) is right up there.
We overpack. Every. Single. Time. I mean, I’m taking like seven t-shirts and will likely end up making 2-3 stretch for most of the week.
Every night for pretty much the last month or more, one of the stories I’ve told Sasha (and occasionally Pace) at bedtime is a thinly-veiled retelling of “Home Alone” where Pace and Sasha get to Mexico and have various adventures while mommy and daddy accidentally get left behind. Fun stuff.
I don’t know if I’ve ever done this before (in a very serious way anyhow) but we’re already thinking about where we’ll go next year!
Shea likes to joke that I was the “best bride ever” when we were planning our destination wedding in the Mayan Riviera back in 2002.
And it’s true – my natural “anal retentive” librarian personality shone through as I pretty much handled all the arrangements from flowers to writing the entire script for the ceremony to picking the music including this song.
But perhaps I should’ve listened to the lyrics a bit more closely beyond the first verse?
According to Wikipedia…
In the lyrics, a man looks back with regret and pain for having lied to the woman he can’t forget (“…and now as I wander, my thoughts ever stray…”) and returned for too late, just as she was preparing for marriage. The lyric is in juxtaposition with the music, which swings with syncopated joy.
Bonus if you’ve read this far: Here’s a slideshow I created for our wedding reception in Shea’s hometown where many of the family and friends who couldn’t make our Mexican wedding came together on an August long weekend for a Mexican-themed fiesta. (I updated it at some point to include a couple other notable events in our life including our move to Ontario and the expected due date for Pace which replaced a joke slide we had in the original showing a picture of Shea with her cousin’s baby and a big question mark which got a big laugh at our reception! Oh, and sorry that some of the slide captions got cut off when I imported the original file to Google. I’ll fix that when I have time.)
For best effect, have Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of John Lennon’s “Grow Old With Me” playing in the background as you watch.
