Such a Life, Such a Life

Typically, my life is rather...well...it's typical. I work (I'm a teacher for Christ sake...how much more typical can you get than that?) I cart my kids around to various activities. I do laundry. I yell at Turbo and Drama Girl some because their bickering annoys the crap out of me. I cook. I eat. I run...you know, typical working-mom stuff. Oh yeah, I also blog about it (which is somewhat less typical, but still...)

So, in typical fashion, my family took what is going to have to count as this summer's vacation last weekend, and I got to run in all sorts of fun places. Then, yesterday, when I should have been getting back to my real-typical world, I did something rather atypical.

The Heffers and I rented a limo-bus and went wine-tasting in Temecula for absolutely no reason other than we wanted to... that and we're calling this Mona's last summer before she goes and gets herself knocked up and will have to stop drinking for awhile. Wine tasting on a Tuesday (in a rented limo-bus) seemed to be a fabulous way to get back to the "real world;" don't you agree?

The good thing about going wine tasting on a Tuesday, besides "tasting" all the wine, and laughing all the way home, and taking all sorts of photos which WILL NOT be published here so as to not embarrass anyone (I'll save that for another time), is that on Tuesdays, the wineries are almost empty, so we rather had the run of the place, and were able to garner for ourselves some rather good deals on the tasting fees (2 for 1 Tuesday!)....ah yes, I remember the days of my youth when wine-tasting in Napa wasn't such a shi-shi thing to do and the wineries actually let you taste the wine for FREE...

As for Tuesday, I do have some rather fuzzy recollections of a poor (young) wine-tender (what do they call those people who pour wine tastes at wineries? They can't be bartenders), looking somewhat overwhelmed by the 9 of us asserting that he really needed to give us a two-for-one discount because we are all teachers (he did...ah, the beauty of Tuesday).

It also took me most of the day to recover from the little nap I took on Madge's sofa when we returned...the problem was that Madge has a CAT...and I am very allergic to CATS...and the CAT decided to sleep on me...I think the CAT-hangover was far worse than any wine-hangover I may have been suffering from today. (Which is my lame excuse for why I didn't run today).

The ride on the limo-bus gave Edith and I ample time to talk about how we need to start developing an actual plan and making some hotel and flight reservations for the Nike Women's 1/2 Marathon in October. If you'll remember, Edith was forced to join Team in Training in order to enter the race because she doesn't know how to spell my name.

It turns out that as a part of Edith's Team in Training fundraising, she gets half a hotel room which she can share with another TiT person, or she (we) can buy the other 1/2 of the room and stay there...sounds good, right? but this would leave four of us in the room for two nights.

Now I love my herd, but (and I've admitted this to all of them) I can be a real hotel-snob (the result of my first career working in the hotel industry), and I can also be a little bit of a high-maintenance traveler. In other words, I want my own bed in a nice hotel (at least 4 star if we can swing it)...and I'm willing to do Priceline to get a good deal!) Clearly negotiations about this will continue...it's true.

We also need to decide when to fly up? Should we fly into Oakland or San Francisco? Do we take the BART or a taxi? When should we return? (Sunday night after the race, or Monday morning)...decisions, decisions, decisions...

In the meantime, I'm back to my typical-mom-life now. Before the Tour de' Temecula, I did manage to get in a 3.25 mile run on the dreadmill (better than nothing). Betty called me today to see if I'd drive over to Coronado to run with her at the beach this evening, but I'm still recovering from the CAT. Hopefully tomorrow, which is when I'll really need a run because tomorrow is my turn to host five 10-year old boys for what we call mommy camp. Five of us moms each take our boys for one day this week. My day is tomorrow, so I'll be taking the boys bowling...then back here for some time in the pool.

I'm thinking I'll need a run (or I'll need to open one of the bottles of wine I bought yesterday). Yup, back to "typical."