A few weeks ago, my husband and I had a very important conversation that all older couples should have once their children reach a certain age. Yes, you guessed it. The topic was whether we should take a vacation without our children.*

* And more importantly, how long we could safely be gone before one of three catastrophic events has happened: (1) the dog died; (2) the house burned down; or (3) the kid discovered that we left her and decided to have a party in our absence.

We decided to risk it. After all, we haven’t had a daughter-sighting** in quite some time.*** (We know she is still alive. Because all our food mysteriously disappears over the night. And, she responds to our text messages.)

The husband and I haven’t been on vacation in a while due to COVID concerns. Once we decided to leave The Kid behind (that, and she declared that she couldn’t go as we were going during her first week of school), we decided to go to the beach. We were originally going to go to Florida but decided against it, again, due to COVID. So we decided on Ocean City, Maryland. Because I still like crabs.

(Looks like I’m in good company when I haven’t take a vacay. We Americans suck about taking vacations. And that was before COVID.)

The best part of going away on vacation (okay, other than the no-working thing) is that you can be messy. You can break all those “rules” that you’ve made for yourself. Such as, don’t walk around dripping wet after a shower and make puddles all over the place. Or, wipe off the counter after you eat, especially something very messy like Maryland steamed crabs. Or, dust the sand off your feet before coming into the house.

You can break all these rules because, eventually, housekeeping will come and tidy up after you. And, it’s not your house, so you don’t care.

In other words, I can act like my teenage daughter.

** This is an event, usually precipitated by me cooking something that she likes, wherein she will actually leave her room.

*** Right before we left, my husband realized that he forgot something in the house. He went back in, and lo and behold! She was sitting in my office chair, giggling at some Tik Tok video. Apparently, us leaving the house precipitates said event as well.

This newsletter, I have the pleasure of introducing everyone to Nora Kane, who wrote the Margot Harris mysteries. She’s doing a very nice box set of 5 books for $2.99 on the Kindle right now. I like that Margot is a female private eye. We need more strong female leads!

This is a box set, available to read for $2.99 or for free with the Kindle Unlimited. You can get two months free or right now, Amazon has a 6 months special running for $30 (that’s half-price)!

I’ve been reading two different books lately. One is The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors, which, as the name implies, is about the history of the Templars. This book is super interesting (and also, very long). I bought it for “research” purposes because I’m seriously still thinking of writing an epic fantasy with lots of fantasy short story spin-offs.

The second is The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing. Truthfully, reading great works of literature is boring. Everyone who thinks otherwise is lying to you because they were suckered into reading these “great works” at some point in time, probably from some class or another. And then, they lied so much that they convinced themselves that these great works were not boring. But, I tend to get myself into a lot of trouble by doing things that are “good for me” (hence, law school). So I chalk this book up to something that is “good for me.”

With love,

Maureen

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P.S. Thank you to everyone who has sent me an email. I apologize for not returning your thoughtfulness as of yet … but I plan on fixing my email situation after the vacation! But please know that I appreciate everyone who takes the time to reply to my email newsletter.