Vacations, taxes and priests

Vacations used to be fun. Before I was a band geek, I'd spend my summer vacations doing nothing. I'd babysit my brothers, but honestly, how much supervision does a teenager actually do when she's babysitting? When my sister was around, I spent my time entertaining her and her friends or doing her chores. I promised not to put my brothers through that torture so I just let them play in the tub. They could spend all afternoon playing in the water. Fortunately, nothing bad ever happened. Considering a person can drown in two inches of water (something I learned watching TV), I guess stuff could have happened, but didn't. Plus, it gets so hot down here and my parents didn't add an AC until after I graduated high school, that I didn't even have that much of a mess to clean up. The water would evaporate.

We also took a lot of naps during the summer. Something about the heat that would just knock us out. Occasionally, I'd take my brothers with me to my friend's house. He lived near us and his parents were always out so my friends and I would hang out there. The first time I took my brothers, the older one, Jude, turned to me and whispered, "It feels like a store in here." My brother had never been inside a house with central air. Actually, neither of them had and I felt so backwoods and poor and sad.

Our priest used to scold us for fanning ourselves with the church bulletin during mass. The jerk would say, "It's not as if you have ACs at home an are accustomed to the cool temperature." True. But we did have windows that opened more than two inches.

My cousins used to hang out at the mall when the temperature was unbearable. There was no mall option for my brothers and me. We just stayed in the coolest part of the house and stayed out of the kitchen between 4 and 8:30 p.m. But this post is about how vacations used to be fun ...

Now when I get time off from work, instead of spending my vacations looking for a place to cool off, I spend it making plans to do chores and running errands and doing stuff that needs to get done, but end up doing little of what needs to get done.

So during my break, I plan to get together all my tax information, sew buttons on Daniel's pants and mend and fix his shorts. I will suck it up and toss years and years worth of magazines that I know I'm not going to read and hopefully, if it's not too hot, I'm going to watch a movie with Dan'l. If it does get too hot, we'll just have to go to the mall because I'm not ready to turn on the AC yet.