You know it's time for a vacation when...
Three nights in a row, you catch yourself just shy of locking your home computer with Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Vacation, gotta get away...
People ask, "where do you go for vacation if you live on The Island?"
Well, so far, I haven't. We've been here just shy of a year, during which we've moved in, lived through two hurricanes, had a baby, taken a painfully short maternity leave, and waged asymmetrical warfare against the resident insect life. My husband left The Island for all of 48 hours for a funeral two months ago.
So now we're taking a trip. I won't call it a vacation. We're flying to New England, where we will go to the woods to live deliberately with my in-laws -- including my husband's Euro-grandparents, with whom I do not share a common language. They seem to like me well enough; but last time we visited them, I broke one of Oma's plates; and when they visited us in the Baltics, Oma broke her clavicle. If we get through a visit together on neutral territory with nothing fractured, I will consider it a big win.
Anyway, at the end of this week, Gigi plays flower girl at Uncle Mikey's wedding. Then we'll make a trek down the coast. I used to love road trips, before they involved minivans and a matching set of preschoolers. This is undiscovered country: here be dragons. Or freakish purple dinosaurs. If only one of us drives, the other one can drink, right?
We'll stop at various midAtlantic points, until we reach the next wedding, my cousin's.
I remember this cousin as a baby. I held him up to my grandmother's apartment door and taught him how the locks worked. The kid could probably wipe the walls with me at chess by age five. He's now approaching the quarter-century mark and will probably be lending Bill Gates money before he's forty. (At the very least, he could kick his @$$ at bridge.) I say this out of admiration, not jealousy. I can not begrudge him his good fortune in avoiding our common ancestry's disastrous math genes.
But I digress. I'm going to be doing that a lot over the next ten days.
And I probably won't have regular access to the internet. See that whole "live deliberately" bit above.
So by the time we get back to The Island, I will probably need a vacation desperately. And I'll be back to square one, where people say to me, "Oh sure, you need a vacation - Duh! You live on The Island!!!"
Oh fate, how you mock me.

Potty Training Vignettes:
My husband looks bewildered. He says, "I've just been handed a piece of poo wrapped in tissue."

I'm too busy laughing to ask whether there was a card.

So it turns out that "Bastin pheromones" should really be rendered "Bahstahn" pheromones. My correspondent was referring to the fact that I married into Red Sox Nation, where people "pahk theah cahs". He seems to believe that I am unduly influenced by an atmosphere redolent with RSN vapors. No, dearie, it's not pheromones; that's the smell of Nine Games Up.

The <&*^%$> dryer is electric.

So how have I found an hour just now for blogging? In fact, I am hiding from my children, who are howling in stereo. At six-months-and-change, The Boy is both teething and reluctant to fall asleep without being nursed into dreamy oblivion. Gigi, at this moment, appears to be having a Night Terror. Google it yourself, I'm too tired to hyperlink. Wikipedia has a good article too.
Our little angels have set aside any latent sibling rivalry in favor of solid tag-team relay work: The Boy is home from the hospital, sleeping without sound effects, and back in school, so it's Gigi's turn to have a fever. I blame the fever for precipitating this current episode. I went in to check on her about 30 minutes ago, and she not-quite-woke-up and started pitching a fit. Think about reel one of the Exorcist, minus puke.
So while the kids wear themselves down, I have to stay away - but close enough that I can tell whether they are in any real danger. So I can't avoid the screaming, and I can't quite tune it out.
Anyone with kindly suggestions about coping with this situation without locking anyone in a closet, imbibing Night Train by the case, or violating a Commandment, drop me a line at purplescareblog@gmail.com. I'm going to go fold some laundry, see if sticking my head in the dryer gives any comfort.

To Twitter, Not; Two Twits
Arguably, an opening line like that is reason enough for me to seriously reconsider a course of action.
Since I put that little badge in the upper right hand corner of Purple Scare, I've had people asking me Why Oh Why Would you do such a thing???

To which I have generally responded, because I can link it to Purple Scare and update more frequently and quickly.

One of my more loyal readers (perhaps the only one who is not a relative by blood or marriage) replied to me thusly:

Allow me to be the voice of reason, or at least a
stocky robot with flairing arms crying "Danger!
Danger Will Robinson!"

Blog. Do not Twitter, do not pass go, do not collect
$200. In your blog posts, you can riff on life,
politics, philosophy. You can vent, cheer, ponder,
mourn. And it affords you the opportunity to do it
all with style and humor. Your insights and
personality are what we crave, not the banal details
of your physical life.

Twitter is a slippery slope to such posts as:

... is peeing. Slight cloudy, primrose yellow
(PANTONE 13-0755 TC)

...is writing on Twitter right now

...is thinking about her next Twitter post


I'll chalk up this momentary lapse in good judgement
to an overabundance of Bastin pheromones in your
household, and we'll never speak of it again.

And what I wrote back was this:

"[...]find me an extra hour a day to compose worthwhile banter and insight, I'll personally hand you your Nobel Prize.

"If I start Twittering about bodily functions more intimate than food cravings, then by all means, feel free to put a bullet in my head.

"Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go Google 'Bastin pheromones'."

I have met my alter ego, and it's a cartoon character. At least I'm somewhat better looking.

Mixed News about The Boy The good news is that they are pretty sure it's viral, not bacterial. The bad news is that they don't want to send him home yet. One more night in the hospital, whimper. I miss my baby.
Last night I stayed up way too late, playing with the new feature you see in the upper right hand corner of my page: Twitter! Between the lack of sleep and facing another day with my baby in the hospital, I was pretty useless at the office today. I am resolved to get to bed at a decent hour tonight. Which is looking less and less likely, the more time I bugger around on Blogger, I suppose.
Yeah, the whole "thinking clearly" thing just isn't working for me. The only thing keeping me out of bed right now is the certain knowledge that I will have an even harder time getting out of bed tomorrow if I have to face a ginormous pile of dishes first thing in the morning. Ugh.
My husband is enjoying a well-earned night out, his first in weeks. His primary social outlet - a floating poker tournament - has been shut down while Powers That Be try to figure out whether it violates local gaming laws. Fortunately, he has alternatives. All work at home and no play outside the home makes Dear Husband a tad stir crazy.

Little man turned six months last week. This boggles my mind.

I am way behind on the blogging. Here's how insane I am: boy got sick over the weekend. If you've seen Intolerable Cruelty, you no doubt remember the character "Wheezy Joe" - that's what the boy sounded like. Add in feverish, inconsolable, unable to sleep for more than two hours at a stretch, and you have a pretty good idea of what he was like.

The pediatrician put him in the hospital for IV antibiotics and nebulizer therapy. I am really very calm about this. Either that or I am too exhausted, after 48 nearly sleepless hours with a crying infant, to register anything other than relief.

I was packing up a little bag to go to the hospital so I could be with the boy overnight. My husband talked me out of it, assuring me that I would sleep much better at home. Still, I was this close to taking my laptop to the hospital so I could stay by my son's bedside and catch up on drafting posts. The hospital doesn't even have internet connectivity. But I could at least compose in Notepad!

No, readers, I stayed home and let the qualified professionals stay up all night worrying about him. When it comes to staying up all night worrying, I guess I just have to settle for being an ambitious amateur.

It's very late now, and I should be in bed. At least I know that when I go to work tomorrow, everyone will understand why I look like a panda bear with a meth jones.