Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Off I Go, Again

In about an hour, I'll be back out travelling. This time, though, it's just a private vacation - spending a week in my parents' house in Spain. Me, Lori and two of our best friends. It's going to be great, I think, even though the weather forecast of course shows rain and thunder for the upcoming week. Thanks, Weather Gods.

Fortunately, all four of us are board game geeks, so the idea of being "stuck" in a house in Spain with the rain pouring down isn't as dreadful as some others might have found it. Not that I wouldn't have preferred sun - don't get me wrong - it's just that we're not as dependent on it for a good time as some others may be.

But of course something had to go wrong the last minute. As we pack up the cats this morning to take them to the cat hotel for a week (oh boy do they ever love being locked up in a cage for a week - not to mention the SAME cage; there's no sibling love between this particular brother and sister), we find that Ada has a wound on her chest. So quickly off to the vet with her, they say that she needs to get stitched up and probably needs antibiotics which makes the whole thing with the cat hotel quite a bit more difficult.

Fortunately, our friend Maria is the nicest person in the world and offered to go to our house once a day for the next week and feed the cats and make sure that the wound doesn't get infected. So the cats got a free pass from the cat hotel (or "prison" as I'm sure they think of it as) this time, and it all ends up for the best. Except maybe for Maria who needs to go to our place once a day.

I've played some poker since I got back, and I've run horribly. Completely awful. I won't bore you with the details other than to say that it would be nice if I could ever get some action with AA/KK preflop, and if I could perhaps avoid being dealt JJ and QQ at the same time as someone else gets AA and KK. Oh, and perhaps it would also be nice if I could win QQ vs. AK at least once.

I said I wouldn't bore you with the details. Sorry about that; I should have kept the lid closed on that particular Pandora's Box.

But never mind poker and downswings! Spain! Rioja Wine! Sun! ... or rain. Or whatever. It'll be good to relax and get my mind somewhat off of work for a week, although I'll be bringing my cell phone with me, and I expect to take some calls from the office.

I leave you with this, my greatest musical hero of all time - Tom Waits. Words are superfluous. He blows me away. The music is a bit tough to digest for some people, but... Oh, brother. Tom Waits. I don't know what else to say.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Waits:

1 comment:

Beth said...

If you're looking for an alternative to the cat hotel, I'm not sure if you have things like this around there but we've used a service that comes around twice a day and feeds the cats, gives them some love and scoops their litter. It's $20 a day but the cats get to stay at home and are never mad at us when we come home from traveling. We also now have a teen neighbor girl who stops by and does the same thing for half the price.