Just. Breathe.

We broke tradition this year and went on vacation at the beginning of the summer season instead of the end! Rebels, we are. Back in February or so, I had a friend who started a travel agency and a daughter who was stressing about her 2nd semester in college, and a vacation just sounded like something we needed. I immediately thought of a cruise, and the family took about 3.4 seconds to get on board with that wild hair.  And finally it happened! We left early (EARLY!) Saturday morning--5am to be exact--in order to get to the ship as early as we could and beat some of the lines. Fact: 7-day cruises start on the day of departure, even when departure isn't until 4pm. So get there, get a deck chair and some food and drink, and start vacation! The deck would never be that empty again! We stopped by the room to drop off our bags, but the steward, Libert, was still working. We didn't understand until later why he was a little upset that we were there -- he was decorating our r...

Happy Thanksgiving! Yeah, I'm late. Sue me. We had a great time off, and went to the bro- and sis-in law's new house. It's lovely, the food was awesome, and the company was great. I stayed mostly Paleo (couple bites of pie) and I lost a pound. Go figure. :-) Now I'm back to my highest total loss, and rather happy about that. Which is the actual point of this post -- I have the best possible incentive to get the next 10 pounds off... We booked our anniversary vacation for February! Whoot! Me, in 9 weeks We finally settled on a cruise. We'd looked at all-inclusives, blah blah, and honestly couldn't decide. Once we started thinking about cruises (we've done that before, and kinda wanted something new), it didn't take us long to remember how much we like them. We are going for a longer period of time, which means a bigger ship, and we're upgrading our room to a mini-suite with balcony! Never done that, so it should feel pretty special. The...

I'm back! We had a great time at the beach and would have loved to stay longer.  The seagull misses us. We had amazing food while there -- every family was in charge of one dinner, picking the menu and cooking it. We had a shrimp boil - potatoes, corn, sausage, and shrimp boiled together. Seriously yum. [Only half Paleo - didn't care.] Next night we had "Juicy Lucy" burgers. Apparently Tony watches Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives and got inspired. It's a bit of hamburger meat wrapped around a chunk of cheese (Velveeta, no less), then that's stuffed inside a 1/3 pound or so of hamburger and formed into a patty. When you bite into it, cheese runs out. Yes, I'm serious. In consideration of a few of us, he DID make some plain ones. We managed to snag the leftovers to bring home. On our night, we made chicken and beef fajitas with all the fixings -- rice, refried beans, guacamole, pico, onions and peppers. I had riced some cauliflower befor...