I haven’t had a vacation in over a year and outside of my trip to England for M’s wedding, since my parents moved to New Mexico, my vacations have primarily been trips to visit them.

Before that, I couldn’t really afford to take vacations but somehow I managed to scrounge up enough money for one out-of-town sci-fi convention every year — I went to Visions in Chicago once, MidSouthCon in Memphis a couple of times (once to see Timothy Zahn, who happened to be an A-Team fan, btw; and once to see Laurell K. Hamelton who stopped me in the hall to complement me on my “I am the bad guy” t-shirt), which always seemed to coincide with a speaking-in-tongues Baptist convention and you’ve never seen anything until you’ve seen small African American women chanting while genuflecting as they back out of a convention room and a troop of 6-foot plus tall Klingons back away in fear.  I’ve been to DragonCon at least three times and some local convention near Jefferson Davis’ home, when it was still standing, before Katrina.

After moving to Maine, I took one weekend trip to D.C. and one weekend trip at Halloween to Salem, MA.

The truth is that I don’t travel well.  Even if we take out the bad luck factor where luggage is likely to go MIA and flights are either going to be canceled or delayed by half a day, there is a large amount of anxiety involved.  I used to be certain that it had to do with a fear of flying (and the recent plane crashes have not helped with that theory); however, I now think it has more to do the stress of not being in control.

While I hate driving with a passion, I’m not all that fond of being a passenger either — it’s actually the time wasted in the car that bothers me, the inability to do something productive or at least do something I enjoy.  I feel that at least if I were the one in charge of the flight I could control when we leave, which would be as soon as I arrive at the airport so there would be none of that frustrating frittered away time where I feel uneasy about pulling out a laptop, a book, or a knitting project because any moment the flight attendant might make an announcement about boarding and then there would be lost time trying to rush to put things away.  If I were in control of the flight, I would be able to control how fast the plane was going and I would be able to see on some radar map just how far we had left, which would ease my mind perhaps — like in high school when I worked at the Winn Dixie, which I hated more than cleaning the toilet, and I would watch the clock and count the number of minutes I had left until I could go on break, to lunch, or home.

Instead, I have all of this anxiety about the waiting and the lack of control and it mostly starts from the time I know I’m going somewhere until I actually get back to my home.

Then there’s the pain of the fibromyalgia.  I don’t know why, but I can relax on my sofa for a whole lazy Saturday but 2 hours in a airplane seat will cause my body to hurt all over for two or three days.  After an hour, I usually feel as if someone has been torturing my legs and I want to tell anyone and everyone anything they want to know but no one is asking me anything.  All I know is my legs hurt so bad that I can’t keep them still.  It’s the kind of pain where if you rest it for just a millisecond, it burns, but you just know that if you move it to another position it will be better, but after you’ve moved it and let it rest for a millisecond, the burn returns.

That’s how my whole body feels on my worst days.  Usually it’s just my arms, hands, and legs though.

So, this is why the thought of traveling anywhere usually doesn’t sound like the funnest thing to me.

I am planning on taking my first vacation in over a year in July.  Originally I planned on visiting my parents for 2 weeks in New Mexico.  I like the idea even though it takes about 24 hours each way and it usually takes me a full day to recover each direction.  However, for the time I’m visiting with my parents, it’s nice to have a place to just be — somewhere to watch t.v., play on the computer, read books, knit,  talk with my mother, go shopping with my mother, go out to eat, occasionally go sightseeing, and just be lazy without worrying about work.

I’m not really a go sit in the sun-get-a-tan person as I am extremely fair-skinned and burn easy.  I’m also not really a go-adventuring-all-day person since I got sick.  The two weeks of daily sight-seeing in England nearly killed me.

So, the other day, my mother mentioned that maybe instead of my going to their house for two weeks, the three of us should go on a trip.  She suggested we go to Hawaii — “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

I didn’t even mention that I have no idea what people do on vacation in Hawaii other than tan and look at volcanoes; I just said, “No, not to me.”

“Why not?”

“It just sounds like a long plane ride.”  That had actually been the very first thought I’d had about the whole idea.  I think maybe a long time ago, I might have jumped at the idea of going to Hawaii, but now I don’t want to travel anywhere I don’t have to or the reward isn’t greater than the pain involved.

So that got me thinking.  What do other grownup people without kids do on vacation?  I need some suggestions.

• Today I am thankful for amusingly weird bits of overheard conversations.
• Today I am thankful for not being paged after hours.
• Today I am thankful for a successful (if partial) project “go live”.
• Today I am thankful for Pugs that still smell like soap a whole day after a bath.
• Today I am thankful for a CNN anchorman who has obviously watched Office Space and knows what “a case of the Mondays” is.

People often talk about how stressful funerals are.  They talk about how traumatic a death in the family can be.  From my experience and from the stories I’ve been gathering the last few days, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the funerals that are stressful or nor is it the death that is traumatic; it’s the living survivors that wreak all of the stress and trauma on each other.

One of my friends said that since his grandmother’s funeral two years ago, his extremely large until then close-nit family still has cousins and uncles and aunts that aren’t speaking to each other over stupid stuff.

When my step-grandmother was murdered in college and it came out in the will that my mother was inheriting everything, my then 18 year-old  cousin, who had actually lived near her and run errands for her and done many favors for her, had a complete howler monkey meltdown directed at my mother where he insisted that my mother give him my step-grandmother’s car because she’d promised it to him.  Now, if he had just asked nicely, my mother would have just given it to him; instead they didn’t talk for 10 years or so.  About when his father died.

Last year, my friend NG when to a funeral where the widow was handing out copies of Ron Paul’s book.

Funerals make people crazy.  They make them do and say crazy things.  Sometimes it brings out their true selves and sometimes it just drives them to the edge of madness from the grief or the stress of dealing with all of the other crazy people.

I really have been working hard to “go with the flow”, especially when dealing with my family.  I’ve come to accept that after all of this time, they are not going to change the way I’d like.  It’s better to accept them for who they are and “go with the flow”.  However, I can only take so much of conflicting messages, especially when they are packed together in a very short period of time, and I can only take my father’s unbending desire not to be inconvenienced, especially when it’s done under the guise of “helping me”.  Three days of Go-Don’t-Go-Go-Don’t-Go topped off with my father trying to help me find a cheap flight by making my trip uncomfortably longer and then insisting that if I arrive after 5pm, no one will pick me up at the airport because that would mean he would be late to the visitation — after my aunt had told me that if I arrive after the visitation starts, my father would just go pick me up;  to think that she has known him longer than I and yet she clearly doesn’t know him at all.  Then when I was so upset that I was crying, my mother wanted to know why I was crying.

In the end, I used priceline.com’s “Name Your Own Price” to get a flight out of Portland rather than Boston, which is where my father had me leaving from and which I would have had to take a cramped 2 hour bus trip just to get on the plane — good way to inflame the fibromyalgia.  Of course, I took a real chance because I could just as easily have been arriving at 7 or 9pm, which would have pissed my father off, as leaving at 6am, which just pisses me off and is what happened…both coming and going.

The truth is that I am not going to the funeral to see my parents or my aunt (though that will be nice).  I am going to say good-bye to my grandmother.  For someone who was diagnosed bipolar, she would have disapproved of all of this insanity.  She preferred the illusion that we were all one big happy family that got along.

I guess that’s the benefit of being the beloved late relative at the funeral — you get to keep the illusion of peace, which the living are left with the stress and trauma they are heaping on each other.

• I am thankful for freshly bathed puppies and that special clean smell, despite the wet pillows on the sofa.
• I am thankful for priceline.com’s “Name Your Own Price” option, even if it means the airline gets to use me as filler on the 6am zombie express flights.
• I am thankful for Eddy’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream after a “discussion” in which my father “just tried to help me” according to my mother.
• I am thankful for living on the edge of a rural town where wild turkeys will just wander through my front yard like they own the place.
• I am thankful that Pugs are the jesters of the dog world for without my personable little jester, I would have missed hours and hours of laughter, joy, and entertainment.

• Today I am thankful for lazy Saturdays.
• Today I am thankful for Movies on Demand.
• Today I am thankful for cheap baskets from The Christmas Tree Store.
• Today I am thankful for sunshine and blue skies.
• Today I am thankful for my Oxycodone stash¹ for the migraine on the move.

¹In case you haven’t heard or haven’t tried to fill an Oxycodone prescription in the last month, Oxycodone is nationally backordered.  No pharmacy or hospital can get it.  The same day in early February the hospital released an in-house memo regarding the issue, a pharmacist from a national chain told me it would be late March at least before anyone would be able to start filling prescriptions again.  So, I’ve been hoarding my last 4 tablets as if they were precious jewels.

• Today I am thankful for audiobooks on my iPod.
• Today I am thankful for shopping therapy at The Christmas Tree Store.
• Today I am thankful for Fish Friday, my favorite part of Lent.
• Today I am thankful for a rare treat of a can of a Diet Pepsi and it was free too.
• Today I am thankful that my mother is just a phone call away.

All week I’ve been avoiding my answering machine.  Something just told me nothing good would come from the phone lines this week, which may be why I let two of my cordless phones’ batteries go dead far from their chargers.   Every evening I came home and glanced at the harbinger of doom out of the corner of my eye feeling just a little plunge of my stomach if the telltale red light was blinking.

By Wednesday afternoon, things appeared to be normal, I’d only gotten a reminder call from the dentist and, despite being on the no-call list, some one trying to sell me lawn-seeding wanted to make sure I got on the list early.

Thursday night I decided to sit down and do my taxes because my father, the CPA who does them for half of the South (sometimes for free), thinks I should know how to do my own taxes.  About an hour into TaxCut, I noticed some things in the “Credits” section that I had a question about.  So, I called my parents house.  I should have known immediately something was up because my father answered the phone — actually a silent alarm went off in my brain but I just plowed ahead anyway and said, “Hey, I have a tax question.”

Right then he just said, “O.K., but just so you know, your grandmother passed away about an hour ago.”  Just like that.  The palliative nurse was arriving to call the time so he asked to call me back.

After I put the phone down, I said a prayer for my grandmother’s soul and I thanked God that her suffering is over.  There was a mixture of sadness and relief; there still is.

For some reason, every time I dream of my grandmother, she is always feeding Pugly. The last time I went to visit her, she was more excited to see him than me.

But as I sat there in the quiet of my apartment, I am ashamed to admit that I began to think about how her death will affect me.  I don’t mean, emotionally or spiritually.  I’m not talking about any kind of will either — I’m not in it; it’s easier to know and accept that long before.

No, I started to worry about the timing of her funeral and the negative impact it will have on my employment.  After all, the economy is not doing well and since the beginning of the year, I have had certain detractors, who can’t seem to find anything wrong with my work so they find other annoying things to complain about — like what time I come to work (no one seems to notice how late I leave), whether I smile enough in meetings, or if I have killed enough trees this week printing an almost replica of last week’s meeting paperwork.  I started to think about how I am the Integration Specialist on the two top priority projects; one is doing a partial go-live on Monday morning, which everyone is far more anxious about than they should be; and the other is a week away from starting systems testing but I haven’t begun setting up what I need to because every time I wanted to work on it to get ahead, my priorities were reshifted to the other project.

So, I feel a lot of pressure and angst about upsetting the indelicate balance that exists, particularly as the department re-org goes into effect starting this coming Monday.

And I feel ashamed that any of this has crossed my mind when my grandmother has passed away.

• I am thankful for Dunkin Donuts strawberry frosted doughnuts without sprinkles.
• I am thankful for Puggy kisses when I come home from work.
• I am thankful for a nice boss who loans me lunch money when I accidentally leave my purse on the kitchen table.
• I am thankful my grandmother had a crazy, goofy life, knew she was loved and cared for, and her suffering is over.
• I am thankful my father really, really doesn’t like snow.

• Today I am grateful that I am employed doing work that challenges my mind.
• Today I am grateful I have neighbors that look out for me, which is such a nice change after experiencing neighborhoods changing from close-nit to alien nations over the last 30 years.
• Today I am grateful for locally-owned and operated delis and their owners and the perks of getting to know them, including feeling special whenever I walk in their doors.
• Today I am grateful that today I have power, heat, and cable when there are hundreds of Mainers who still without heat and power after the snow storm last Sunday night/Monday morning.
• Today I am grateful I wasn’t late for work despite over-sleeping.

After the snow storm that hit Sunday night and into Monday morning, the snow in my yard had tripled, which was pretty impressive considering the rain last Friday had left bare grassy spots in the back yard. Needless to say, any sign of Spring has gone MIA.

Even though the pine tree branches in the back yard were bent and drooping to the ground under the weight of the snow, my crabapple trees in the front yard are damned hardy; after all, they can withstand the weight of those wild turkeys jumping in them all of the time. Here’s a photo of the wind-chimes in one of my crabapple trees; as you can see, the snow in the yard is less than a foot below.