A Trip Not Quite Like They Show in the Ads, But Who's Complaining? We're Less Than Normal Anyway.

Jumping Jehoshaphat (Who is Jehoshaphat, anyway?  Good thing to Google), it's back to the drawing board!  Or keyboard, in this case.  After ten days of travel to Exuma (a tiny and kind of less-popular-diamond-in-the-rough island in the Bahamas) with the family, and one very full day spent in my laundry room washing a total of ten loads of laundry, it feels good to be back and typing away at whatever ol' nonsense comes to mind.
 
The trip was fun and a lot of times flat-out weird.  We did a lot of things that we'd never dreamt of doing.  There is one event that stands out, and the only one I'll bore you with: 

So one of our daughter's big dreams is to swim with dolphins.  Jay and I figured before we headed out on the trip, OK, piece of cake.  No problem.  We're headed to warm waters, shouldn't be too difficult a thing to find some kind of excursion with dolphins involved.  We guessed wrong.  Not one to be had.  BUT!  We found THIS: 

Yup...that's right.  Don't they look cute in the picture?

Swimming pigs.  We rationalized, well, it's an animal, she should be happy to swim with SOMETHING, right?  Not to mention we were probably feeling a little guilt from not entirely believing her right away when she claimed to have been stung by a jellyfish on our second day there.  Which she had, and which we quickly discovered was the truth.  Or for the early morning interrogation she was put through (think the Spanish Inquisition) our third day into the trip, when we got a message from our wireless provider alerting us that her phone number had accrued $4000 (yes--there are no decimals in that number) in data plan overages (that was wrong and got fixed, only after Jay's forehead had turned the color of beets, never to recover 100%).   But those are whole other stories, both which she'll probably keep in her coffers for when she needs to pull the guilt card on us.  And so we signed up for the tour which included the pigs; the images in my feeble, unwitting brain were of swimming with the likes of that little mini pig, Kingsford (damn he's cute):

Kingsford--who wouldn't want to hang out with a beastie that looks like that?

 So you can imagine my surprise when our boat pulled up into the bay and this is what we found:

Yours truly having a grand old time with one of the pigs.  Not quite Kingsford's size.

This gesture apparently means "Feed me NOW."

They were HUGE.  And HUNGRY.  And to make matters worse, there was a really strong current there that made you have to keep swimming so that you wouldn't get swept away from the boat.  Those freaking pigs made swimming against it look effortless.  Not.  So our pathetic, jelly-stung daughter missed out on swimming with the pigs, too, simply because the idea of picking her up a few days later on the coast of Cuba wasn't all that appealing.  Personally I think she would have freaked the minute one of those hooves or snouts came into contact with her, anyway.  Chaos averted.

And now it's back to reality.  The laundry was crazy, but it's done.  This was a portion of what I faced yesterday morning: 

Crikey.

It took me around twelve hours to finish it all.  And actually led me to be grateful for the meagre and terrible way Jay packs for himself when allowed, which to my chagrin usually leaves him for the last two days of any vacation mixing outrageous patterns and/or colors, or looking as monotone as the UPS delivery guy, all because he refuses to pack the least bit over what he believes he needs.  And don't get me started on how he is always short a few pairs of underwear.  Scariest of all, I think this way of thinking is following through to our son.  To his poor wife-of-the-future, I'm sorry--it happened too fast for me to stop it, and now there's no correcting it.  But I won't complain, because I think their lack of clothing chops saved me at least one extra load of laundry.

It's good to be back.  As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."  And now let the imperfections and dysfunctions resume on home turf.