But I'm holding on. We're here on the left coast of Florida, and there is a red tide holding us hostage in the room. First of all, you don't want to swim in anything that kills fish, secondly, you don't want to sit on the beach and smell the rotting fish, and thirdly, the wind and waves and general evapotransporation puts the deadly red algae in the soft sea breezes, leading to a hacking cough.
All of which is fine with me, anyway, because to me a vacation entails a lot of naps, and if I can't take them on the beach while toasting myself to a crisp, then I'll do it in air-conditioning with no problem.

The other vacation staples: drinking and shopping, can be done at leisure, sun, red tides or rainstorms notwithstanding.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a fine vacation.

Add to that that I can access my blog account and there is nothing at all wrong in the world.

Excuse me, gentle readers, but there is a fresh mango margarita upstairs with my name on it.

For reasons I won't go into here (my brother, Biggus Dickus, bought it) I have in my possession a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. This would be just fine by me, except the tea-totaling bro bought vanilla-flavored vodka, which is practically undrinkable.

This, combined with the beginning of mango season, brought me to this morning's experiment. Can I make chicken salad out of chicken shit? Or, to be more exact, if I let most of a ripe Springfels mango steep in a mason jar of vanilla vodka for a while, will it be any more drinkable?

I'm thinking mango martinis. Mango martinis, or swill. It's got to be one or the other, and since I already have swill, what do I have to lose?

This is a day off for me, and it started out lamely enough with me waking up with a headache. Like, the kind of headache that feels like someone with a fifty-pound thumb is trying to press out your eye, from behind the eyeball.
Ignoring that, I went off to work out with Nic Cage (aka The Marquis de Steve). There was no parking at the gym within a three-block radius. I circled three times. I would have gone into a four-block radius, but the fourth block is Dixie Highway or residential areas and they frown on parking in either location.

I had to valet park. At the gym. Which is so against my religion. That religion being if you're going to work out, anything that makes it easier (i.e.: parking next to the door, valet parking) is prohibited. You're there to sweat, not take it easy. And yet, due to the fact that there was absolutely no place to put Zelda Bleu, I had to valet. Which I still would not have done, had all this circling around like a shark hunting blood not made me very late.

Got home and logged on to the i-tunes music store, because there were some things I wanted to download. I shopped until I had a cart full of obscurities, then went to download and check out. No can do. Need to update to i-tunes 4.8. Not a problem. Except, it was a problem. For some reason, I can't update because, although I'm an administrator on my own computer, the stupid Wintel device thinks I need to talk to a system administrator. I even tried creating a new account that was strictly admin with no customization at all. Still won't let me update. Fatal error.

Yeah, I'll say. The fatal error being it's a piece of shit Wintel computer that I had to buy because the hospital took away my Mac and wouldn't let me use one anymore, and then gave me such a load of work that I had to get a Windows machine on my own dime so I could work at/from home, too. Then the asshats laid me off and here I am with a stupid Windows machine that I'd never in a million years have bought of my own volition.

Except. Now I don't have to use a Wintel machine, do I? And if I wanted that sweet, sweet, sweet 15" PowerBook, I could get it. And you know what that means, don't you? This Windows machine would be a doorstop faster than than you could say reboot.

The day the RLA and I viewed this house, it was raining. The glass barn doors to the pool deck were open, and the house, with its dark Dade County Pine ceiling, was as cozy as a summer camp cabin. The rain misted through the screen over the pool deck, and it was almost like it was raining inside the house.

We were thoroughly charmed, and didn't see the other things like the do-it-yourself projects that had been done poorly. We bought the house.
To this day, thirteen years later, I love this little place in the rain. I woke up this morning at six, planning on driving up to Jupiter to meet with my brother and the estate lawyer. That plan soon ended when I discovered we were in the outer squall bands from Tropical Storm Arlene.

We did a conference call instead, and I was ensconced on the sofa, coffe mug in hand, cozy little house around me.

Good thing, too, because my brother is a greedy, grabby idiot and had I not been in the zen womb of my snug little cabin, I probably would have been leaning over the lawyer's desk slapping the cowboy hat off my brother's head.

Here's the deal. I want to buy his half of the family home, so that I can live in it. He wants to sell it to me, but either wait until Mummy dies and have the house appraised then, betting on the real estate bubble still inflating, or do it now, cash in his hand and the fact that I'm only semi-employed be damned. Or, he says, if I can't scrape the bucks together, maybe we should (read "You, little sister, should") empty the house and rent it out. We could put that money aside and when Mummy dies and I'm ready to leave Miami (where I brought her to live because he couldn't be counted on to take care of her) then I can let him have all the rent as part of the payment I make to him for the house.

Heaves a sigh. Contemplates the coziness of my little house. Sips coffee. Pets dog. Waits for blood pressure to lower.

He has a wife, you know.

There's blue, and then there's something else. I'm so down, it can't be the blues, it has to be something deeper. Indigo? Ultramarine? That funny crayon that nobody ever wanted to use: Prussian Blue?
Whatever. I'm in one of those funks that even therapy shopping can't help. Of course, it's hard to therapy shop when even a box of colored pens is equal to a whole day's (as opposed to an hour's) wages.

Nevertheless, it hasn't stopped me. I went on a mini-spree over at Think Geek this morning.

Tell me that this isn't one of the funniest things you've seen in ages. I think that it's right up there with the old Godzilla fire wire hub.

Anyway.

Tonight is the big season premiere of Queer Eye, and they are making over the Boston Red Sox. Anything that shows Johnny Damon is a good thing, excess facial hair notwithstanding.

I'm off to mall world, sweetiedarlings, wish me well in the world of acquisitions.

Due to stupidity on my part, comments have been turned off for a couple of weeks. I have now turned them back on. Feel free to leave one.