Back From Vacation

It Was Quite a Week

All right, I’ve been back for almost a week, but I haven’t had time to write this yet so here goes.

We made it back from vacation this year and I’m ready to hit the ground running. I have to say that I really enjoyed the trip this year. As we do whenever we can, we took the family over to Sedona for a week with my parents. They have a place there right on Oak Creek and it just beautiful there. I know that everyone loves vacations and getting away from the grind does everyone a lot of good. Still, I really feel like time out of this place refreshes me. I’ve been working at home running the site and being a work-from-home dad for the better part of the last decade. Those of you who work from home will understand the feeling you get after a while. When work and home share the same space, work always seems to be calling. I can work all day and promise myself two hours at night to watch a movie, but after about twenty minutes, the call of the work always wins out. So the only way I can really relax is to get out of the house and the further away I get from the office upstairs, the better.

This year my whole family went so it was a great get away for the kids, the grandparents and Mrs. Rog and I. We got to sit around as a family and eat dinner, play games and enjoy the sounds of the creek outside. We’ve been to Sedona enough times that we have done all of the touristy things and there is nothing we “have” to do. I really like that feeling. Of course it takes me about three days to actually get into the relaxing thing. That’s when I realize just how “on the go” things are at home. Between work, the kids, the house and any number of other things, I am always up to something. Once I got used to being able to do what we wanted when we wanted, I really started to feel good.

There were some great highlights to the vacation, but mostly it was just one week of very relaxing days, laugher filled nights, great food, more love than I can describe and some really, really bad horror movies. (Dad loves them, mom hates them and Mrs. Rog could care less so vacation time is great for dad and I to catch up on them.)

One of my favorite family vacation traditions is the first BBQ. There is a market in Sedona that always sells the best tasting beef. Sometimes it is applewood smoked beef, this year it was bacon/beef patties. Grilling with my father and then enjoying delicious homemade burgers always reminds me of camping when I was a child with my grandparents. It also makes me realize how I lucky I am to be 41 and still able to look across the table to my father and compliment him on another wonderful meal.

This year was especially relaxing for Mrs. Rog and I because we have had some rather difficult medical news to deal with recently. (Things are fine and I will discuss it more when I do the guest blogger recap.) Getting away from everything really helped us and we even got away from a night out together without the boys. We also spent a lot of time at the pool and playing games. It’s funny how things that could be done at home are just so much easier on vacation.

While I was away I saw a couple of good movies, rented a number of bad ones (Rob Zombie should be shot for what he did to “Halloween” but that’s another story.) and sat on my favorite rock next to Oak Creek watching the water rush until I wanted nothing more than to just stay there forever.

That’s the problem with vacations I guess. Just when you start to really enjoy them, it’s time to head back home to the real world.

While I was gone, I had some great guest bloggers taking over the site. I hope you all enjoyed Tina Tyler, Aurora Snow, Moxxie Maddron, Ivan, The Pope, Suzie, Riley Steele, Rio Valentine and the others. I want to send a big thank you to all of them. Knowing that the readers of this site had something interesting to read made it much easier for me to leave “my baby” behind a bit and focus on other things. I hope you enjoyed their postings as much as I did. I am working on a wrap up of all of their blogs, but I already know that they are all anxious to hear your feedback. So please, if you have any thoughts, good or bad about any of the blogs you read while I was gone, please email them in right away. I will include them in follow up postings and maybe we can keep this going.

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