Vacation

I am on vacation in Miami, Florida for the next week, which one would think would be an excellent time to work on my rather lacking posts, except that I am getting frustrated with the broadband connection on my Dad's laptop. I will attempt to post here, but it is easier said than done.

Firstly, I go on vacation during February most years, but this year I am not really on vacation. It is more just that I am in Florida, still doing all the normal work that I do at home. The main cause is that my thesis is due at the end of the week. I won't go into all the messy details, but it is a very long analysis of the effect of residential schools for the Deaf on the Deaf community in America. I have been working on this one paper all year from US history but the rough draft must finally get handed in, so it's crunch time now. So far, other from that, the vacation has gone surprisingly well.

We are renting a nice little house on Key Biscayne, and I have my own bedroom so I don't have to share space with my sister. This is a big improvement over the normal hotel arrangement. We are visiting my grandparents and trying to enjoy the weather, but it has been a bit on the cold side lately. Down here they think 50 degrees is cold but it is still an improvement over the New England snow.

The biggest downside so far is that my iPod broke. This has happened before because I have the older 20G Photo model. I am very fond of it and I really don't want to have to shell out $300 dollars for a new one. So far Apple has been great about fixing or replacing it whenever it breaks but it is no longer under its extended warranty so I am a little worried. Usually I would just listen to CD's until I could get to the Apple store but this is especially frustrating because I am on vacation. So I have nothing to listen to while doing work or while I am on the plane. Plus we have no music for the car because we usually use the AirPlay to listen to music over the radio. I guess I'll just go back to the stone age for a while and listen to the radio online while I work.

On a slightly different note, I have a great travel story from last night. We went to the Winn-Dixie grocery store (in the very large mini van we rented) to get everything we need for the house. Now we needed a lot of stuff: not just food for a week, but toilet paper, laundry detergent, and everything else a rented house doesn't have. We spent quite a bit of money, despite all of my mother's comparison shopping efforts. The cashier asked us if we had a Winn-Dixie card and of course we didn't because we don't have Winn-Dixie in Massachusetts. Well, it turns out that the supervisor was bagging our groceries and he noticed we would have saved a full $20 with the card. Being a good person he offered to scan his supervisor card so we could save the money. I was shocked. Nobody at home would ever do such a nice thing. He even told us that if we came back again for more milk or whatever just to come find us and he would give us the discount. It's so encouraging to see real people doing the right thing and rebelling against big businesses.

It's always quite eventful going on vacation with my family, so I am sure more stories are on the way. Of course, how could they not be when you are travelling with four people, six large duffel bags, and two sets of golf clubs.