The Month We Used Our Two Tickets to Paradise

by Michael Sahno | Oct 31, 2022 | Articles | 0 comments

I haven’t posted on the blog since 10/3, but I have a pretty good excuse: my wife and I were on vacation.

Unlike many of our peers, I especially do not like to let people know I’ll be out of town. No matter what kind of security system you have, it’s not easy to feel 100 percent at ease when you’re 9,000 miles from home.

Actually, my wife and I were more than 9,000 miles from home—9,407, to be exact.

You’re Going Where?!

And I must admit, I always get a kick out of it when I tell people who don’t know me well that I’m heading to Thailand.

Back to Thailand, I should say, since I’ve been there nearly a dozen times.

See, my wife, a.k.a. the lovely Sunny, hails from Thailand—the Ubon Ratchathani area, to be more precise. And she and I built a house on her parents’ property last year, which you can see above.

We hadn’t seen the new house in person ourselves yet, and, long story short, October was the only feasible time for a host of reasons. So off we went.

An Overdue Vacation

I know I’ve been kvetching about how I need a vacation for quite some time (here on the blog and to folks I know). I mentioned it in the September 19th post, Taking the Time to Tell You I’m Taking Some Time. That post alluded to the upcoming vacation without any details…just “I’m taking a little time off with my wife soon.”

What I didn’t say was that “little time” would be about three weeks…which I know sounds like a lot to most folks. But what I also didn’t say was that this was the first time my wife or I have taken a vacation since 2017.

Coincidentally, that 2017 trip was also to Thailand. So the lovely Sunny hadn’t seen her family in five years. We originally planned to return in 2020, but you probably remember how that year turned out.

And one last thing, to make this a somewhat writing-related post: I took a vacation from work of all kinds. That means I didn’t write the entire time, and I was fine with that. I realize many of my fellow writers think a writer never gets a vacation, thanks to guilt-inducing quotes from Ionesco or others.

But I’ve asked myself: do surgeons perform operations on their vacations? Do lawyers do any lawyering when they’re at the beach with their families? I’m gonna say no. Not if they want to be good spouses, parents, etc.

So no, I did not work. But I’m back at work now and will be around for a while. Stay tuned!

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