Report from Vacation Week

I’m back from vacation, and I thought I would give you a quick report.

Really, there’s absolutely no good reason I should be giving you a “report” from my annual vacation. As if it could possibly matter to anyone else in the world!!!

But… I just got back into town from vacation a couple of days ago, and I’m trying to string it out as long as possible. Also, I need to write about something to fill my space, so a “report from my vacation” is as good as anything. (The bar is actually not very high, as you probably already know. The topics I typically write about are along the lines of “Did I tell you about the time I trimmed my toe nails” or “I really need to lose some weight: I’m a Big Fat Giant Hippo Pig Whale”.)

This vacation did, in fact, have a bit of drama: A young girl swimming at North Litchfield Beach, just a few hundred feet from where I swam, was apparently bitten by a shark… a few hours after I left for home. And although I was long gone and heard about it later on the TV news, I still consider it to be High Adventure… possibly even “My Brush With Destiny!”

My REAL true life animal adventure for the week was nearly as harrowing: Raccoons attacked our garbage can during the night… less than 80 feet from where we were sleeping, two floors above the ground behind a triple-bolted door. I could have been seriously frightened… had I not been sound asleep, enjoying a REM cycle that wouldn’t have been disturbed by a Mack truck driving though my bedroom.

Not to take any chances, however, we left the garbage bag on the upstairs screen porch the following night. Better safe than sorry, we figured. I’d hate to become one of those raccoon-attack statistics who you always hear about on the news from places like Australia and California, but never think it will happen to you!

Turns out, raccoons are wiley.

About midnight, we heard the screen-door slamming. Our worst fears were being realized: we were facing a raccoon attack! The rodent had figured out that the garbage was being stored, not in the garbage can, but on the upstairs porch… and had made its way up the stairs and onto the porch…. managing to open a closed screen-door along the way! Crafty devil!

When we summoned up the courage to venture out onto the porch, the wascally-wodent scampered up into the ceiling, out of our reach. And, within an hour or so, he had signaled the “coast-is-clear” alarm to a couple of his friends: an opossum and a fellow raccoon. The three of them were having a big time terrorizing the tourists… which was me! You couldn’t ask for more hair-raising horror if Stephen King suddenly appeared.

So, anyway, now you’ve heard the highlights from my vacation: missed the shark, but saw the rodents.

If it sounds boring…. yes, perhaps it was, which was fine with me, because my sole objective for the entire week of vacation was simple “taking naps”!

I took lots of naps.

Naps in the evening. Naps in the morning. Naps in the afternoon.

I took breaks from my naps so I could take more naps.

It was wonderful.

I heard some of my relatives talking about exercising during vacation. But not me. Exercise would have interfered with my naps.

The result of spending a full week of vacation wherein your most strenuous activity is searching the Internet to learn the feeding patterns of various rodents is simple: you get FAT. Which I did, during my week of vacation napping at various locales adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, of course, its time for the other shoe to drop, figuratively speaking. (Did I mention that I wore flip-flops for an entire week during vacation, literally speaking?)

The other shoe is the DIET. I have fattened myself up very nicely. (Did I mention that I’m a Big Fat Giant Hippo Pig Whale?) Now its time to drop those pounds like an off-key Idol contestant.

Which means its time again for the Next Annual Semi-Organized Weight Loss Competition… the same one I mentioned a few weeks ago in anticipation of leaving for vacation.

So far, we have 10 willing contestants who have answered the call, but there’s still room for YOU. (Actually, there’s only room for you if we all meet in a very large room. For that matter, there’s only room for ME in a large room anymore.)

I won’t bore you with the details of the coming weight loss contest. I already did that sufficiently during the raccoon story, I believe.

Rather, I will direct you to my Automatic Electronic Internet Blog -- www.doingthefirst.blogspot.com – and let you read the details for yourself. However, I will let you know that we’re planning to kick off the contest on Tuesday, July 15th with our official beginning weigh-in… at which time we’ll figure out the rest of the still-somewhat fuzzy contest details among ourselves.

If you’d like to join the pain, agony, and misery of a public weight loss contest, let me know. Email me at RodShealy@aol.com, and we’ll count you in.

But I’m not begging. I’m not trying to force you to join us… although I think it’s pretty obvious you need to. This time, I’m not even taunting you with insulting comments about your girth (did I mention I thought a saw a whale at the ocean?), the size of your behind (how many hogs do you reckon were BBQ’d for July 4th), or the fact that the shade created when you stand outside could be one of the long-term solutions for our global warming crisis.

And, by the way, have you ever noticed how a raccoon waddles when he’s climbing up a post?