home sweet home

well. i was on vacation last week, and have since returned home and to work. everything seems to be just the same as when i left; frigid temperatures in the office and the amount of work coming in is slow-as-a-slug!

vacation was nice. mike and i went to sea isle city, nj with his family; grand parents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. in total there were 14 of us lounging in the beach house and on the beaches. we've been staying at the same place for several years now. it's a nice place that is just the right size and it's right off the beach. which makes it super convenient and easy to get to the only place you really want to be when you are at the beach - by the water! but i have to say, this year was my least favorite so far. mostly because, by about midweek, the central air started to give out. by late friday morning it was an oven in that place. i think most of us were slightly miserable.

i guess it was wednesday when the temperature had started to warm up inside the house. the mornings seemed to be fine, but by the afternoon hours it was most definitely creeping up there. that first night, wednesday night, it must have bee like 77 degrees or something. not so hot that we couldn't handle it. but it surely wasn't ideal. then thursday night it was like 85 degrees! that is when we all new something was wrong with the air. and then by friday it was 90 doggone degrees! unacceptable!!

no one in the upper hierarchy of the family did anything either. you know? the ones that should be doing something. well, that's not true. it is unfair of me to say that they did nothing. they did look for air filters. but after searching for and not finding any air filters, or whatnot, it was decided that there was nothing they could do... they simply decided to deal with the hottness. figuring that when when it was leaving time, they would inform the owners of the issue. i personally would have called the owners as soon as i realized something was not working. we paid good money to vacation there so why shouldn't we have working central air?

to make things worse, during the warming temperatures i was dealing with more than just my sweaty sticky skin. i had been fighting a headache for several days. by friday i had lost the battle and it was a rager. i actually teared up and almost cried while sitting on the beach just thinking about how bad it hurt. it was a big banging headache. so i decided to leave the beach that morning around 11:30 a.m. to go back to the house to:

• try and cool off (what a joke)
  
• take some tylenol
• eat something and
• lay down and try to sleep it off a bit
  

when i arrived back at the house it was warmer than i had wanted it to be. but then again, so were the past two days in the house. stupid central air. be it as it was - it was cooler than the beach. so i ate an early lunch and laid down. i slept till about 2:45 p.m. and was hot as a fresh cow pie when i woke up! cranky, i stumbled out of bedroom to see why i was so hot. hm... 89. that was the number that the thermostat was reading out. awesome! it was 89 degrees in the the house and it was only 2:45 in the afternoon. i tried a cold shower. nope. not working. head still banging. so i did the only thing i could do to cool off. i hopped in the vw touareg, started up the engine, jacked the air to low-as-low-gets, put the seat back and shut my eyes. i must have sat there for 30-45 minutes; just long enough to settle the banging of my head to a low dull drumming.

needless to say, we left early that evening to come home. rather than sweating it out one more night and staying till saturday morning, which was check-out day anyway. there was no way i was going to sleep there for another night.

it's nice to be home.

............jfk.............