A Vacation, Anniversary, and Anxiety Attack

August 24th, 2008 by Jaybrams

Wow, it’s been a while; lots has happened in the thirteen days since I rambled about Beijing. Michael Phelps won eight gold medals, the Chinese girls gymnastics team got away with cheating, and the US once again topped the medal standings. In the meantime, back in the states, I went on our second vacation of the summer.

This time we traveled to former Olympic host city Atlanta, where I lived for about eight years of my early childhood life, in order to visit my brother, his wife, and their dogs. It was our first trip over there as a family and it was quite enjoyable despite driving 1600+ miles (and don’t start in on me about flying being as cheap as driving with the cost of gas; i’ve done the math and it’s just not true, especially when your car gets close to 40 MPG on the freeways). The drive out was pretty uneventful but did seem a bit long for the girls. Coming home was a completely different story…

If you’ve never driven interstate-20 in the southeast states that’s okay, google images serves us well… This is basically what you will drive through for the majority of the trip. The trees are slightly shorter and more dispersed in Texas and Louisiana, but it’s miles upon miles of this in Alabama and Mississippi (thanks to whoever i stole this image from):

I-20 Trees

So, what was the big deal coming home? Non… Stop… incessant (redundant)… ceaseless (repetitive)… unremitting (loquacious)… torrential downpour. Imagine being surrounded by 30-45 foot trees with a very low and very dark storm system unleashing (as my dad would call it) a gully-washer for two straight days. I can honestly tell you that we would have barely been able to make out the 18-wheeler in the photo above during parts of the drive. Not all of it was that bad, but out of the 13 hours we were on the road, about 10 of them were spent driving in wet and rainy conditions, but alas we made it home safe and sound, just a bit more wound up than I would’ve liked.

The day we returned, Dionna and I also celebrated our 9th anniversary! I don’t know the exact statistics, but i’m going to guess that they’d say we had a very small chance (20%-ish or less) of making it this far based on the circumstances surrounding our marriage, but by the Grace of God and an extremely loving, caring, and all around wonderful wife, here we are… one year short of a decade and growing stronger every year. We dropped the girls off at my moms and went to Dave and Buster’s for a nice meal and hours of game playing fun. I wish I could tell you the wonderful things I did for her on this trip and on our anniversary, but I must confess that there was so much going on at work, school and with this trip that I was a less than stellar husband this time around. Usually I have pretty decent and sentimental things planned, but I dropped the ball this year. I didn’t forget about it, it was just less than memorable. I’ve already apologize profusely for my lack romance this time around and will start planning for big Number 10 as soon as possible.

So you want to know about the anxiety attack? I had one… a real one… it kinda freaked me out along with several other people… it’s embarrassing, but it comes with good news too… but this is already long enough, so i’ll save it for a post in a day or two (Cliffhanger ).