Vacation

How Do I Get One?

Vacations are important and necessary. It’s a time to spend time with your family, relax, and have fun. So I’ve been told. I haven’t relaxed all that much lately. I’ve been so busy for the last few years that relaxing is my idea of having fun, but I’d like to get to the point where relaxing is mundane. Then I will have fun.

Vacations can also be tricky. Ever try to organize a vacation with more than two adults? Serious negotiations have to take place. Whoever isn’t having fun is the lousy negotiator. Either way, fun is going to involve money. That’s right, our level of fun depends on how much money we have.

If you tell me that a vacation doesn’t have have to involve money it’s because you’ve learned to love the great outdoors and sneak past an entrance gate. What you mean to say is that a vacation doesn’t have to involve much money. But this, too is a lie. Contributing gas money to the carpool for a trip to the beach and eating a prepared picnic before shivering until dawn in a pitched tent is only a vacation until you reach the age of reason. That’s when you say “I’m outta here!” and drive to a hotel. So I’ve heard.

Fun is horribly expensive. That’s the crappy part. Want to travel to a far away city? Ha! It costs too much money. Want to go to the Grand Canyon? Money! Want to tie a giant rubber band around your ankles and dive off of something high up in the air, like a balloon? Money! Want to go to Disney World? You need the kind of wealth only the lottery can provide. No, you’ll be paying off your rubber band vacation until Christmas, assuming you survive, and envying all of those college aged kids who were able to cheaply backpack to Siberia.

This is why my only option is to stay home. It’s fun not to spend money. I don’t have any, but it’s still fun not to spend it. And relaxing.

One reader said that this strip made Tabby the type of person he wouldn’t like to be around. I think she would agree with him because she doesn’t want to be around him either.

Tabby is just being selective about who she shares her time with. The idea of meeting anybody and everybody is exhausting and annoying to her. She’s such a cat.

When I was in the fourth grade I mentioned that I had a headache to one of my teachers. To my great surprise, I was sent to the nurse’s office. Then I was sent to the principal’s office where I annoyed the two secretaries so much that the principal burst out of his office and told me that he didn’t care how badly my head was hurting. If I didn’t stop talking he would take me into his office and do something you can no longer do to students without getting the court system involved. I believe the word “paddle” and “ass” were also mentioned.

Yes, I was the last generation to go through that.

Anyway, my mother was phoned and my older sister drove to the school and got me back home, where I did whatever I usually did, only much earlier in the day. People in my family got headaches. The idea of a headache being a legitimate excuse to leave school never occurred to me. They weren’t migraines, but they could get pretty bad. Now, of course, we live in an age with wonderful headache medicine that performs miracles. When I have a headache today I can, thanks to modern science, just continue doing what I normally do. That miraculous headache medicine costs about four hundred bucks.

This was out of character for April Bloom, but I made her the Assistant Manager and it’s the Assistant Manager’s duty to allow everything to pile up on the Manager’s desk. Doing anything less would be shirking her duty.

Nobody wants you to go on a vacation until it’s immediately imperative that you go on a vacation for your mental health. It’s more of a convalescence than a vacation at that point.

The idea of a retail theme park was too much fun for me to ignore. Really, the park needs a large graphic novel to explore just how stupid it can be. I’ve been to far too many theme parks. It’s a big reason that money I had in the past is no longer with me in the present.

Many people have “out of office” messages on their email, interoffice messaging systems (like Teams), and voicemail. They have an elaborate explanation stating that while they are away they will have limited or no contact with any of their messaging systems. Some day I hope to be a part of a society where we don’t have to state that. If someone is on vacation please don’t bug them and leave it at that.

I spent quite a long time drawing everyone in the strip for that last panel. Then someone commented, “Where’s Rusty?” Arrrrghhhhh!

Here’s Rusty. Sometimes these strips just write themselves.

Obviously, we’d need a lot of shopping carts in these ride designs. It would get a little old after awhile, so other retail items would have to be used for seating. Maybe we would need a graphic novel trilogy.

I think Charlie takes a nice picture. Penny needs a trip around the world so Charlie can be posed with a variety of landmarks.

Thank you for joining me and excuse me while I take a mini-vacation. Some may call it simply going to sleep, but overworked people know a real vacation when they see it.