A lovely weekend off at the Jersey Shore.

Do you even know how to take a vacation?

Those were the words out of my daughter’s mouth when my husband and I told her that we were going to take a vacation this week. We returned to the U.S. (from Belgium where we’re living now) with the girl to take her back to college. After we dropped her off and saw her settled in, we planned to take a week’s vacation. We were going to do absolutely nothing but sit by the pool at our condo, go for long walks, read, and play games on the computer. No work.

Ha!

I really hate to say this, but my daughter knows us too well.

Yesterday, at the start of our “vacation”, my husband spent an hour working on his computer and another hour on a business call. I spent an hour working on a client’s formatting and the rest of the morning making corrections to My Lord Ghost, which will be published toward the end of this month.

Now, I did manage to spend some good time down at the pool in the afternoon and was only lured back up to my apartment when my son came home and texted me to say he was enjoying a root beer float and did I want one? I would do nearly anything for a root beer float. There was one word in his text, which I completely missed: “hard”. He had bought some hard root beer, as in alcohol! I didn’t even know such things existed! So I enjoyed a bit of booze at four o’clock in the afternoon. That’s okay. I’m on vacation, right?

Well… until I remembered that I’m going to be giving a talk in a month and needed to upload my new cover for my writing book, which meant that I needed to put together the CreateSpace cover (I’d already designed the new cover last week when I was supposed to be helping my daughter get ready to move back to college). That, naturally, led to updating the backmatter for the book. I still have to re-format the ebook, but that’s going to be a big job, so I put it off for now—I’m on vacation, right?

This morning I started my vacationing by researching where I want to advertise My Lord Ghost and beginning to read a new-to-me book on writing copy that sells (I’ll have a review of this book next week, probably).

Um… vacation?

The rest of the day is going to be spent cleaning and re-organizing my apartment, which my son has moved into while my husband and I are not living here. My son’s tried to cram all of his stuff into the closets. He needs some help and more storage space–not that we have a lot to give him, but we’ll do our best.

Did someone say reading? Relaxing by the pool? Ha!

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

This weekend we take advantage of Labor Day sales in order to fill up our suitcases with American goods we can’t get (or are more expensive) in Belgium. Shopping? Vacation? Well, for some people, I suppose. Not me.

I had looked forward to a week’s vacation. Maybe I’ll get one… around Christmas. Oh, wait, no, I’ll be promoting a new book by then, won’t I? Nuts!

Have you managed to take a vacation this summer? If so, what did you do? Did you manage to actually get away from your work?