……and I’m the pinball. I sit here on Tuesday night in a bit of a confounded haze. The last 10 days have been the strangest jumble of work, vacation, travel, rushing and relaxing I’ve probably ever encountered. I’ve already detailed some of it in posts below, but part deux can be neatly summed up this way: last Saturday night, I realized that the bed I was sleeping in was the fifth different bed I’d slept in the previous seven nights. That makes me sound downright prostitute-ish, doesn’t it?
Truth is it went like this: from the Argent Hotel in SF to Meadowood in St. Helena, to the La Quinta Inn in Oakland (talk about a transition!) to my house for a night, then to Yarmouth/Cape Cod, for what turned out to be an oft-frustrating exercise in half vacationing, half-working. Of course, it wasn’t intended to be that way, for when I’m on vacation, I am usually on vacation (see: don’t f’ing call me. ever). But a deal came down to the wire on the two days that I just happened to be vacationing and I simply had to be present, unfortunately. Highlight: walking around beautiful Nauset Beach (pictured above) trying to find suitable cell phone coverage.
It’s not the best feeling to have your wife sitting there by her lonesome while I’m off on these calls, so I felt a little crappy and frustrated about it, especially because I’d been gone the previous week, too. Luckily for me, my favorite lady is a keeper – an extraordinarily understanding and patient person. She’s not crazy about the whole work-during-vacation thing (nor am I) but she understands and consoles. It’s also very rare for me.
But it definitely wasn’t all work, either. We found our way to a couple of great beaches and wandered around a few extremely quaint and beautiful Cape towns where we found ourselves continuously driving by houses, exclaiming “I’ll take that one!” as if we were multi-millionaires. We also found (and cooked) some terrific food, to boot. I should add there’s great chowder in those parts. Obviously.
Pics here. Next: mow the lawn, weed the garden, pick some vegetables, catch up on work, ignore the Red Sox. Definitely ignore the Red Sox.