What vacation?  I’ve gone nowhere.  I was frequently absent from Xanga for a few months late last year and early in 2010, due to a compelling addiction to several Facebook apps.  Then, sometime around Valentine’s Day, I quit going on Facebook, quit using the computer altogether.  In no particular order, here are some of the ways I have been spending my time while staying away from the computer:

• breaking up – this year’s breakup (the spring thaw in the local vernacular) has been a gentle one with little rainfall and freezing nights between the warm days, giving meltwater a chance to run off or soak in.  This was especially fortunate, because last winter’s snow was deep.
• taking care – I had lapsed from my healthy low-carb, gluten-free, non-allergenic diet, and was making myself ill — digging my grave with a fork and spoon.  An excruciatingly painful episode of pancreatitis shocked me back onto the nutritional straight and narrow.  I am now enjoying better health.
• getting some work done – Since the summer of ’07, when the series of lung ailments began that ultimately landed me in the hospital that winter, entropy had ruled in my home.  By working a little at a time, resting whenever fatigue sets in, and then working some more when my legs are again steady and my grip firm, I am making great progress on restoring some order and cleanliness in here.  I also removed the ornaments that had been on a hanging ivy plant through two Christmases and put them away.  The ivy plant was diminished by the experience, but is recovering.
• being vandalized – somebody, apparently randomly and without reason, let the air out of both my front tires recently.  The main clue that they had not gone flat on their own was the absence of dirt on both of those valve stem covers, while the ones on the back wheels were crusted with the usual layer of dried breakup mud.
• Bonding with my son – Greyfox acquired a full set (or nearly so) of James Bond videos at a Friends of the Library bag sale, very cheaply. Most were on VHS, and a few (including Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale) on DVD.  The Bond books and movies were key elements in my young adulthood.  I enjoyed seeing the old ones again and catching up on those I’d missed in the interim.  Doug enjoyed watching them with me.  We Bonded for weeks before returning the videos to Greyfox.
• getting gifts – We had been using the PS2 and X-Box as DVD players until Greyfox got a new system a couple of years ago and gave us his old DVD player.  The VCR we were using was an old one Greyfox brought from PA twenty years ago, and its tracking didn’t work.  The monitor for our game consoles was a big old TV we got for $25.00 at a pawnshop around the turn of the millennium.  This winter, the DVD player quit altogether.  The old TV would take days to warm up and the tube brighten if it was shut off, so we were leaving it on and wasting a lot of electrons.  Greyfox, in a startlingly uncharacteristic move, gave us a new media player that takes VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray (of which we have none so far), and offered us a 26-inch HDTV.  Doug supplied the extra bucks and made it a 32-inch.  We still don’t receive broadcast or satellite TV, and cable still does not come this far, but the games and videos really look good on the big screen.
• emergency macramé – as part of my housecleaning, I excavated many “new” things — the various good stuff to come from the dumpsters at felony flats — and had no place to put them.  We screwed new hooks into the ceiling and I made hangers for some of them.
• planting seeds and propagating – Some of my new macramé hangers are intended for nasturtiums and morning glories that are as yet just seedlings, and others will support plants that are now growing from cuttings that resulted from some trimming and grooming of my old houseplants.
• birdwatching – Waterfowl are returning here for the summer.  A few days ago, I heard cranes calling overhead and looked up to see two of them circling above me.  They kept up the song and dance until a raven intervened and chased them away.
• cracking books – I mentioned that it was originally Crackbook Facebook that led me to neglect Xanga last year.  I spent a lot of time there before developing an aversion to it.  Since then, I have been back to reading.  That has helped with the housecleaning, too, by diminishing the stacks, heaps, boxes and bags of books that have accumulated from Greyfox’s acquisitions.
• conquering the world – In the breaks between working, I have won victories as each of the sixteen civilizations and over all of them in the Civilization video game, in each of the first three skill levels, and two victories at the fourth level of difficulty.  It’s getting harder, taking longer, and I’m spending more time on other pursuits, so I don’t know how far that trend will progress before it fizzles out entirely.
• gearing up – Greyfox’s weekly booth at the Wasilla Public Market will be starting in about a month.  He’d like to have some earrings of Alaska jade to sell to the tourists, so I’m trying to clear up the clutter off my worktable.  In the process, I discovered that the roof had leaked into my tool caddy and some of my pliers and other tools are rusty.   Did you ever have a job that gets bigger the farther you go with it?  That’s my worktable.