Finishing, nearly dying, playing, watching.

I just got back from vacation! We hadn’t planned for it to start the same day my revisions were due— it was just sort of serendipitous that it worked out that way.

I also hadn’t planned to be without Internet or cell service for five days! We went to a place we’d been to before, just a couple hours from home— through a canyon to a beautiful little mountain valley. Since we’d stayed there several times before, I thought it might be fun to switch to a different resort.

The different resort just happened to be a little past the mountain valley. We just didn't know that "a little past" meant at the top of the mountain above the valley. High enough up that when you come down the mountain, even if you’re in the lowest gear and only pump your brakes, you could still overheat your brakes, making them not work, thereby skyrocketing your chances of taking an unplanned flight off the edge of a mountain.

This is, thankfully, not a picture of me.

Okay, maybe I’m being overly dramatic. (And by “maybe,” I mean NOT AT ALL. I came down the mountain when it was already hot outside, and after a while of low gear and pumping my brakes, I found that my brakes had gotten too hot, and weren't working! I kept searching at the mountain that hugged my right for the least damaging place to crash into it as a way to stop my forward momentum, because that would be a lot better than soaring off the cliff on my left when I couldn’t slow at the next turn. I tell you, the flock of guardian angels racing down the mountain with me really earned their keep.)

The lack of Internet combined with impending death-by-mountain if we left the resort, meant that we got to spend a lot of time just hanging out together as a family. Which, after three weeks of me being physically present but mentally busy / stressed / in another world / working on a tight deadline for edits, it’s just what we needed.

We swam a lot. Put together puzzles. Explored the trails around the area.

 And played really complicated board games.

My husband has a “gaming” gene. He passed it along to each of our kids. And that pretty much left me as the only member of our family with non-gaming genes, feeling like the only way I could “play” is by playing with the pieces.

See the stem of the flower? Those are pictures of a brain, making it a “brain stem.” Hahaha! Get it?

I had always assumed that I didn’t have the kind of brain it took to play games that have more pieces than the word count of my current WIP, and that take longer to play than it takes to read 100 blogs. But I did it! And not only did I play it (every day, for hours), but I owned. It wasn’t a game where you're against the other players— you win or lose as a team. And *ahem* I totally helped the team win.

And every night we had a Lord of the Rings marathon.

My older kids weren’t getting LOTR references, and my youngest didn’t remember ever seeing it. How sad is that? We realized we were sorely lacking in our parental responsibilities to rear our children in the appreciation of LOTR. Luckily, we were able to rectify that on our trip.

And now I’ve done an entire rambling post with nothing at all to do with writing! Just so I’m not the only one, what’s something non-writerly you’ve done lately?