Soon: sneak out early, as the light creeps over the horizon, to steal away in a little silver car and chase the sun as it sprints its way across the sky.

Destination: I wouldn't call it unknown, but I'd also not call it common knowledge. We'll take our shorts and our ballcaps, and pack CDs for the CD player. We'll take our new copy of 'Settlers of Catan' and perhaps a book or two. We'll steal away, just for a few days. Jeff's going to catch up on his sleep. I'm going to work on my sunburn. (Ooop! Must not forget sunblock!)

Tonight I sat in the restaurant with the man I married nearly four years ago and we laughed—yes, we laughed—over dinner. He has laughed more in the past two days than he has in the past few months. Perhaps the same could be said of me. It hasn't exactly been a year of laughter.

Tonight we did the most suburban thing in the world: we ran into an old friend at the grocery store. We got caught up on our mutual friends. Marriages, births, and in my family's case, deaths. We exchanged up-to-date contact information and a small faux pas or two, and agreed that once Jeff and I were back in town, we'd settle in for dinner and the swapping of some good sci-fi novels.

We'll do a lot of driving over the next few days. We'll be back in a few days, just in time for me to catch up with Jeremy and head out to the crawfish festival in Birmingham, where for a measly five bucks we'll see John Mayer perform.

I'll come home tired. Footsore. Exhausted. Sunburned, undoubtedly.

In the meantime, I can't decide whether I should be naughty (see: juicy book with pages left to read) or responsible (see: packing for early a.m. departure time).

Responsibility, bah. Blame it on my vacation.

(Entries will return in a few days. Why not poke through the archives in the meantime?)