my days off

 It's my dad's birthday this weekend, but since I have to work, I made him a cake last weekend to celebrate early. I make him the same cake almost every year: a yellow cake with vanilla whip cream icing and lots of sweetened shredded coconut everywhere. He's a big fan of coconut.

There are a few foods that I have a problem with not because of the flavor, but because of the texture. Shredded coconut is one of them. The other most notable mentions are oatmeal, rice pudding, and soggy cereal. This cake is for my father's birthday but it still hurt a little when I pressed coconut into perfectly good icing and mixed coconut into unsullied cake batter. This is how he should know I love him.
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This is what my dining room table has looked like for the past two weeks:

And I feel like that's how it's going to stay until late August when school starts again. So far Perry and I have only made one trip to an office supply store to buy some classroom supplies and I can already see that this is going to get expensive. Perry won't start getting paid until September, so I don't know how new teachers are expected to come up with the money to buy all of these things. Is it considered along the same lines as having to buy nice clothes for an interview before you have a job?

I've gone with Perry once to see his new classroom and it's going to take several more trips to get it cleaned and organized. There's a lot of throwing out to do since the teacher that had the classroom prior to him was a bit of a pack rat. Four people mistakenly thought I was the new teacher when they saw us together cleaning out the room. I thought it was because I'm older, but Perry says it's because I'm a girl.

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I visited my parents and nephew like I do every weekend I'm off. My nephew was making paper swords at the kitchen table, so I sat down next to him and made him a crown to go with it. Less than 10 minutes later he was ordering me to attach a helmet to the crown so he could be a prince knight and had devised a rather elaborate system of "leveling up" crowns.

For each enemy he defeats he would get a jewel affixed on his crown until it was full and then he would level up to the next crown until it too was jewel encrusted. Most of the time I see him, he just wants to play Pokemon on his DS, so it was nice to do something aunt-like with him, even if it was just holding up a paper dragon while he threw a paper sword at it.

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This summer hasn't been very hot at all. Just a few days in the 100's and we're almost done with July. It's been really dry though. My mom stopped by my house to pick up the mail when I was on vacation and she mentioned this weekend how "crispy" my lawn looked. Well la-dee-dah. I've had a lawn for over 5 years now and I still don't get the allure of an eternally green lawn. It's summer. Grass dies in the summer. It comes back in fall. It dies in winter. It comes back in spring. It's the circle of life. And it seems like a waste of water and time to fight it. I'll water something new I've planted for the first year and after thats it's on its own. If it can't handle the Texas summer, 'twas not meant to be in my yard.

texas sage was meant to be in my yard

Back to the point, I was saying how dry it has been...but then it rained for almost four days straight. My lawn is no longer crispy and the temperatures have been hanging around the low 90's.  Best summer ever?

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I woke up last night because the ceiling fan kicked off and I found out the power was out in half of my house. I got dressed, checked the breaker box, found my electric company's number, and was forced to listen to Matthew McConaughey talking with his aw shucks southern drawl while I was on hold (that didn't even turn out to be my lowest point). They gave me another phone number to call and told me that if there wasn't really a problem (?) that I would be charged $50 for having them come out to check my power. Um. Ok. So I called the other number which was automated and put in a work order. Then since my dog Reggie heard me up, he decided he needed to go outside and pee. While we were outside a large mysterious winged insect flew into my hair and I whipped my head back and forth (name that song) so furiously my glasses went flying off my head and into the mud.  By the time I got back in the house the power was back on. Well, shit, I'm not paying $50 if they come to my house and see there's nothing wrong with the power. So I called the phone number again, but it is completely automated and no amount of pounding the zero button is going to make a real live human start talking. In fact by pushing all of the buttons I think I created another work order. So I called my power company again and they said tough shit, that's the only phone number we have, so I accepted defeat and went back to bed. When I woke up the power was 100% out in my house, not 50% and I was so happy since that means I don't have to pay $50. Actually, no. I was hot and angry. And that was my morning.

san antonio

Perry and I recently got back from a four day trip to San Antonio. Since I work 7 days on/7 days off and Perry will have summers off being a school teacher, we have big summer vacation dreams in the future. But that's still the future. Right now we're a single income household and a 5 hour road trip is as extravagant as we can comfortably get. Since the room at the bed and breakfast I booked had a extra bedroom attached and my dear sister just happens to live on the way down, we invited her and her boyfriend to come along too.

I have a confession to make that's rather awkward. I don't do well on vacations. I enjoy planning vacations. New places to see, new foods to eat, new things to do. But there's always a point in every vacation I can remember where I feel extremely...well I don't know. Irritated isn't really the word for it, it's more of a general feeling of unhappiness, loneliness even. Crowds of people make me feel lonely. After a while the unfamiliar seems draining. So much to see that I can never see, so many people I will never know, my small life seeming smaller by the vastness of the world. There's something depressing about seeing an image in a picture and then seeing it in actuality before you and thinking "Huh. Yep. Exactly like the picture." I expect to feel something more and when I don't, I feel wrong and hollow. So much moving around and so little...experiencing. I know vacation is not the best time to have an existential crisis, but there you have it. No matter how excited I may be about a trip I am always incredibly excited to go back home, to my own well worn corner of the Earth, filled with the things I know and love. Have a mentioned that I'm an introvert?

I've gone on a bit, but all I mean to say is this trip was no different from all the rest. I've come to realize that these feeling will pop up on any journey I take, so I acknowledge them and put on a happy face until they wane. Which they always do.

Now here are some pictures. Because that's what vacation posts are about, not whining.


We visited Mission San Jose. I've already seen it twice, but I really love this place, so when our bus tour went by we hopped off for some pictures.

 See? Beautiful.

 The day after our bus tour, we visited the zoo. I don't think I've ever seen a scarlet ibis before, but I recognized them immediately from the illustration in a book of short stories we had to read in middle school. The story with the scarlet ibis was...The Scarlet Ibis. That story scarred me, so I still remembered the picture after all this time.

 And here's a green mamba, from The Poisonwood Bible.

 But since I don't take pictures of animals solely because of the roles they played in literature, here's a hippo.

Taking pictures of your food is lame unless it's of the best sushi you've had in your entire life and you want to document it. Here's Perry's:

Those rolls in in the red sauce may have been the best thing I've ever eaten. Ever. Oh and see the milky looking sake? Perry got drunk. He drinks alcohol about twice a year and had a BMI of 17. It doesn't take much to get him drunk.

Here's my bento.

They served it with two small salads instead of the typical fried roll and wonton. It was so good.

We ate a lot of good food on our trip. I thought we would be eating almost exclusively Tex-Mex since we were in San Antonio but we only had Mexican food for one meal. I went to San Antonio once with my mother and all we ate was Mexican food: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We became so enamored with one restaurant we ate there at least once a day. At least.

And since we were at San Antonio we had to see the Alamo.

Yeah, we didn't know what was going on either. It turns out they were holding a promotion for a boxing match in front of the Alamo. Which seems strange. Oh and there were numerous groups of Christians with backpacks everywhere. Every. Where. It turns out there was some kind of church youth group meet up that week.

My sister and I went back to the Alamo a day later around sunset to take a ghost tour (no judging). And here's a much better photo I took while we were waiting for it to start.

That may have actually been my favorite part of the trip. No, not the ghost tour. But sitting in front of the Alamo on a stone bench eating a snow cone and talking with my sister.

It occurs to me that I'm not the first person to be disillusioned with vacations. Modest Mouse did say "we are the places that we wanted to go." I wonder if that's what was meant.