Obnoxious Bitch
Monday, October 17, 2005
My Vacation
I’ve already been home for weeks, and I haven’t even finished uploading pictures from my vacation… never mind blogging (which I should have been doing every night, dammit!). Unfortunately, it would seem that the bill for my absolutely wonderful time visiting my family came due upon my return and required a payment in the form of stressful events, one after the other. Kee-rist, a bitch doesn’t have time to get a breath these days!
Spending time in CT is always nice, yet surreal in many ways. This trip, I learned that there aren’t nearly as many street signs in Watertown as there are corners on which they should be displayed! It’s a damned good thing I’ve got a pretty keen sense of direction, or I’d probably be driving around somewhere in Rhode Island today, heh. It’s a pretty clear picture of the state of my home state, in that the “suburbs” where the upper middle class people live doesn’t seem to have enough money to put up street signs for fuck’s sake. There are plenty of signs in Waterbury… but man, the place is pretty damned bleak overall. Those people need JOBS, and badly. If I had millions of dollars, I’d buy up some of those beautiful old houses and find a way to help my town come back to life.
Being able to see all my brothers in one trip, and visiting with other family and friends made me wish I’d taken a longer vacation. Everything and everyone are so close together compared to here in SoCal, that I got to spend most of my time actually being with the people I love, rather than on the freeway on the way there or back. I’ve always loved having lots of family around, and even when I didn’t have blood relatives nearby, I’ve always had my “tribe,” or the family of friends that we’ve chosen for ourselves. These days many of those people are living farther away from us than the farthest distance between one of my brothers’ houses to another, so there’s no “family” to speak of within, say, 10 minutes of us. It was amazing to me that I was able to go from Waterbury to Watertown, and back, in half an hour in order to get my niece to work and then get back for a surprise birthday cake for my friend’s dad.
Speaking of nieces, I finally got to meet two of mine that I’ve only chatted with online, or maybe by phone for a few minutes… and they’re both wonderful young ladies, beautiful and smart (but they’re Colellas, so why wouldn’t they be? Ha!). But one of the shitty things about traveling alone is that there’s no one to help take pictures… so I didn’t get pictures with 3 of my nieces, my brother, Tom or the closest thing to a stepmom I ever had, Cathy - which sucks. Oh well, I guess that just means I have to go back again pretty soon. 
There were quite a few times over the 9 days of my visit when I was emotionally overwhelmed, and even now I get a little choked up thinking about just how good it felt to be with people I love in such an absolutely beautiful part of the world.
[more later...]
It’s later—by 12 days! The vacation glow’s worn off, I still don’t have those goddamned pictures up, because life goes on with all its hectic and often insane daily dramas. Work is work, and home life is in a bit of a turmoil (what else is new?) due to a death in my husband’s family. In a perfect illustration of the sheer distance between relatives here, the decedent lived over an hour away, and since that’s where most of the family is, that’s where everything’s happening. There’ll also be an out-of-town relative who needs accomodations… logistics, feh.
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