OK, so our "vacation". My husband goes to Washington every year to fish for salmon. He kills it. This year he brought home something like 16 fish, far short of his record, but we're already getting the smoker heated up.
There were a few awesome parts of our "vacation"; we got to see our nephew sealed to Andrew's sister and husband, I finally met my sister's daughter, Juliana, we spent a lot of time with Andrew's mom, and visited with family. Like, a ton of family. We went to the beach, the zoo, ate at some of our favorite restaurants, and I made two trips to Portland's Rose Gardens, which is high on my list of favorite places in the world.
And then comes the bad stuff. The stuff that forces me to put quotations around the word "vacation".
We ate at a restaurant called Yummy Mongolian Grill in Vancouver. I think I must have put too much oil on my food concoction, or maybe the meat was tainted or something, because I had diarrhea so bad after that lunch that my hemorrhoids made a comeback and I had to take several Imodium tablets. I haven't had it that bad since I was a kid and stood in my bedroom crying while liquid poop ran down my legs and soiled my Rainbow Brite underwear.
I love the Oregon Zoo. They really know how to rock an exhibit and make it look like the animals actually prefer to be in captivity. But better than that, the animals there love to get kinky when I visit. I have seen polar bears get busy, lizards doing some lovin', and my all time favorite, a mandrill exploring himself shall we say? in front of a class of first grade kids who didn't know they were going to get sex ed on their field trip. But this time? No animal lovin took place. It was such a shame.
And to add to the pleasure of the zoo, Poppy posted about Lorikeets at the Oregon Zoo not long ago and it made me super excited at the possibility of scaring the crap out of my kids. So, like the sucker I am, I paid three dollars for three little cups of nectar to entice those damn Lorikeets to land on my kids' hands and scare them into therapy - but no dice. The birds all just sat up in the trees chirping at our stupidity. Three bucks wasted, and no permanent damage to the kiddies.
Then there is the constant rain in the Pacific Northwest. You wake up every day to clouds which may or may not burn off by noon, (most likely not), and you have to change your kids' clothes four hundred thousand times a day to keep the mud and wet off your furniture. By our third day there I was ready to down an entire bottle of Prozac.
The icing on the cake though, and I'm talking some big, fluffy, sugary icing, is that my husband may or may not have a criminal record after this trip. Having been law abiding citizens our entire lives we're not really sure how all of that works.
There was an unfortunate encounter with a game warden at Andrew's favorite river, and there may have been charges of illegal fishing after dark as well as fraud against the state of Washington. Andrew was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He really is innocent, but try telling that to a game warden who I am sure is Hitler's great-nephew or something. Long story short, our kids are going to open their presents on Christmas morning and inside the boxes will be a letter which reads,
"Dearest Children,
The best Christmas gift you could possibly get this year is the knowledge that your father is no longer a wanted man, so I have paid off the astronomical fines that were so wrongly inflicted upon your family.
Merry Christmas!
Love, Santa"
Cause really? It was that bad. But at least he wasn't thrown in jail like the officer threatened.
