You know sometimes it is hard to know what is up from down. What really matters and where I should put my focus. My family. My painting. School. Japan. The yard. Sort of like when I was on the top of the Space Needle and all of Seattle lay out before me, but I had no idea where I should aim that 25 cent viewfinder, where to put my money, what was worth looking at, and what would I miss in the meantime.

     Some days I think that spending even 5 minutes a day caring about what my house looks like is shaving precious minutes off my life that I will pay good money to get back someday. And other days, I would steal millions just to fix my house up, put on a roof that does not leak, make it pretty and clean, and dust free and have a washer that does not bang against the wall like you know what every time I do the laundry. It gets exhausting.

    And that my friend is why God invented vacation. Now I am sure that there are plenty of people that do just fine without vacation or take things too far, take a vacation, from say their sanity and have 30 dogs or too many trips to the store, but forgot to empty the bags and have all of sudden to sleep on a chair with the remote and the TV propped up on a treadmill. Yes, I suppose that here are many ways to take a vacation. BUT for me anyway, vacation is a time when I don’t have to wake up making deals with myself, “get up and I will let you take a nap later” (which never happens, and one of these days I will stop buying my own lies) or “get up and we can go buy a new lamp later”(also rarely happens, I mean how many lamps can one person have?) , or “get up and you get to go see that sweet baby’s’ face again” always works and always pays in the end . There is always a reason to wake up, if only to see what the day brings.

     But on vacation, this one anyway, I don’t have to wake up, and so of course, that is why I woke up at sunrise and keep falling asleep reading my book.

    Yesterday we went bowling. It was a blast. Ironically, the athlete in the family, or shall I say, the one who dresses like one every day, struggled the most but then came around to break 100. The one coming off of a month of Mono was a natural, but really had more fun seeing how slow he could send the ball down and actually get it to the end. My tiny daughter was the best,  besides my husband who I swear has been in a league somewhere and not telling me. I was my usual inconsistently good and then pathetic self, but the gambler in me played something like 6 rounds with my daughter until finally I beat her, though I lost $10 in the end. We were there so long that the people in the lanes next to us changed. First it was a group of Spring Break teenagers or college kids, having the kind of fun only they can have, just hard core fun, scoring horribly and laughing their heads off. They were later replaced by a family of four, who actually warmed up, or at least the parents did, and even though I found it quite comical, for fun Phoebe and I did some of their stretches and it made us do better, I swear.

   Anyway, my point is, that there is no real right or wrong, well I guess there is , but there are no rules as to how one should spend their time, and it always goes back to those very early words of wisdom that always ring in mind…just do your best…it is all you CAN do. Whatever that may be. Oh, and And try not to make a mess of things.

oh and check out this amazing store/place/piece of heaven that will be MY first stop on my next trip to NYC, in fact I might build trip to NYC around going to this shop!
It is called Modern Anthology and they have THE coolest things there, including things that no body needs but everyone should have like lamps made out of vintage Metal Tonka Trucks!

Modern Anthology