When Vacations Attack...

So the Travel Channel now has the following show.

When Vacations Attack

hahaha. Totally fits the theme of this blog, right?

I love it when the universe is in sync with my silly little mind.


In other news, I am ON BREAK for the next two weeks. There is nothing that feels better than being at the beginning of a glorious vacation. I'm not traveling this year, and at first I was really disappointed. I mean, I really wanted to see my good friends in Seattle for New Year's. But the plans would have involved some really dicey traveling on New Year's Day since school starts up for us on the 2nd right away. And there's nothing like coming back all disoriented and tired and having to get through a long week of work, right in the middle of winter when you're achy and cold and miserable anyway. And also, the tickets to Seattle were totally not in my budget. $800 round trip??? Not possible. And even if I had money to throw around, I couldn't spend that much on a domestic ticket, just out of principle. Ridiculous!

So anyway, I'm not traveling. Now that the option is out of my hands, I LOVE not having to travel over the holidays. No airport drama, no anxiety, no worrying about the weather (which has not been too bad around here this month), getting to sleep in my own bed most nights, getting to putter, etc.

And I get to hang out with a ferocious, six-hundred pound Siberian Snow Tiger.

oooh, it's been awhile since I did a vacation gone wrong movie...

Well, I watched this awhile ago, but I think it's worth including, considering it's been a very long time since I did one of these reviews!

And Soon the Darkness



IMDB says: Stephanie and Ellie's vacation to an exotic village in Argentina is a perfect 'girl's getaway' to bask in the sun, shop and flirt with the handsome locals. After a long night of bar-hopping, the girls get into an argument, and Stephanie heads out alone in the morning to cool off. But when she returns, Ellie has disappeared. Finding signs of a struggle, Stephanie fears the worst, and turns to the police for help. But the local authorities have their hands full already - with a string of unsolved kidnappings targeting young female tourists. With danger mounting, and time running out, Stephanie must find her friend before darkness falls.

Let's just say that the beautiful scenery was the only redeeming thing about this movie. Well, I guess the plot was fun. Not terribly realistic or well executed, but fun. It's the kind of plot I love to see if it's well done, but in this case, no. Basically the problem is that the tourists involved are so stupid and make so many silly mistakes that the plot just sort of writes itself. Getting drunk in a pub full of unfamiliar people and strange men and deliberately trying to tantalize them? Check. Separating from their main bike tour in the middle of nowhere and telling nobody where they are? Check. Having a dumb fight and leaving your best friend in the middle of nowhere in a strange country? Check.

And of course stereotypes about the exotic danger of South America are in abundance.

Vacation Gone Wrong Factor: * * * (kidnapping sucks, even if the kidnappers were as dumb as the tourists)

Did I Care About the Characters Factor: * (they were stupid)

Verdict: * * (eh, okay entertainment if you're seriously bored, but not recommended)

Apology!

And suddenly a few weeks have passed since I updated here. I love this blog and I don't want it to slip away, especially because I have at least two people who regularly read and leave comments! (So I totally apologize to Audrey for leaving her comment unmoderated for like two weeks -- eep! *grovels*)

The good news is that I have been in a state of HIGH organization. And by high organization, I mean organization at a rate I have never seen before. Scary organization. It's been all consuming and so far it has only involved one room of my house, the bedroom. Imagine when it gets to my living room! Or worse, the dining room where a lot of paperwork stuff is. D:

I've never been a person to own a lot of "stuff." Mostly because I don't quite know what to do with "stuff." I tend to go through obsessions and interests and I do accumulate stuff related to that, such as knitting supplies for knitting, my future quilting obsession, which I am waiting to contemplate further until after I finish this particular knitting project.

Another reason that I don't have a lot of "stuff" is that anyone who knows me knows that I hate shopping more than anything in the world. First of all, I hate going places where I have to drive. And coming from someone who does NOT live in L.A. -- who lives in a town in the Midwest where it really only takes 10 minutes to drive anywhere at all -- that's pretty pathetic! But it's so true. If I could safely bike or walk anywhere (and the weather was L.A.-like all year around), I would SO not have a car. I am impatient with traffic, paranoid about stupid drivers, and in general just impatient. Secondly, going to places that are crowded and noisy. A store can never be calm and peaceful. There always has to be announcements, bad music in the background, and screaming children and bustling people, lack of temperature regulation (either too hot or too cold), annoying organization that makes it hard to find what you want, etc. So shopping for me comes rarely.

So it's not like in this high-organization phase that I have a whole LOT of stuff to go through. But the thing is, I've always heard this phrase: "A place for everything and everything in its place." I've always rolled my eyes at it because, dude, it seems to be MOCKING me. Always. It sounds like it comes from a very prissy, over-organized, type A person who ALWAYS DOES EVERYTHING perfectly and who has a house that is immaculate and perfectly organized (even with five small children and two dogs running around).

But while contemplating the winter depression that starts to set in in earnest right now and the scattered, disorganizedness of my brain on some other levels, I start to wonder, is it partially my physical environment? Is it partially that I don't know where half the stuff I use regularly is? Is it that I've forgotten what half the stuff is that I've stuffed in random drawers? Is it just being scattered inside and out? So I started a campaign at basically picking everything up and asking:

1. Do I need or use this or is it of sentimental value?
2. If so, where should it go along with like items?

And then I document its existence and location in this notebook. Yes, I'm that hardcore. Because another problem I have is when I organize things, I tend to lose things because my brain gets used to things being in one location, and then I freak out because the thing is no longer there and I can't remember where I moved it.

My bedroom looks fantastic right now! Onward to the middle bedroom, which I dread because there is an air conditioner stored in there and as I recall, when Mo and I took it out this summer just before he went back to Trinidad, I was so freaked by the water gushing on the floor and the potential for spiders hanging on it, that we did not get it very gently into the storage box and one of the side wings (you know, the thing that spreads out the distance between the air conditioner and the rest of the window) broke. Hopefully either duct tape will make it right this summer or those wingy thingys are easy and cheap to replace. I guess I'll find out how easy it all is when it's close to 100 degrees in May this year and Mo isn't back yet and I'm on my own putting it up.

Oh, God, let's just hope I don't misplace the notebook where I've been writing down where everything goes...