M.I.A. Again:
Yeah, I know, five days since my last blog post. But I have a good excuse... I took a vacation. Or what passes for a vacation in my current life.

Since I have Sundays and Mondays off, and go in late on Tuesdays, Suzanne and Katy and Corrigan (my dog) and I drove up to Dallas for the second birthday party of my nephew James Austin. I swapped my Tuesday with Dave so that I could come in at 7:00 PM instead of 2:00 PM, and spent what equated to a weekend up in Dallas.

I love Austin, but I like Dallas, or at least what I've seen of it, as well. It's a nice place to take a weekend, especially when we stayed in the monstrously huge house of my parents-in-law. I don't have any great desire to live in a gated community (and Suzanne would divorce me if I tried to move us into one anyway), and I love our small house, but man was it nice having an upstairs, a big kitchen, a big living room, etc. I just fantasized about having a whole room set aside as a "game room" to hang out with friends in, another room as a library for books, comics, DVDs, a "home theatre" room, etc. If I had the money, didn't hate moving and could find a big place that wasn't in a gated community (to list the main reasons in order), I'd definitely get a bigger house.

It was a good weekend all around. Suzanne drove, which was nice, so I spent the drive up in the backseat listening to my daughter talk back to Diego on the portable DVD player and playing Burnout Legends and World Series of Poker (not to mention an episode of Entourage) on my PSP. We got to my nephew's birthday party and that was a lot of fun. I didn't know a lot of the people there, but it's always nice to see my in-laws, and it was a blast seeing Katy have fun with the other kids there. She went to bed way too late after skipping her nap, but otherwise, it was great.

On Monday, we took Katy to get pictures taken for my mother-in-law. Katy is remarkably shy around guys, and the photographer was a guy, so it wasn't the easiest thing to do, but he did pretty well, and his wife sort of made faces and played with puppets and got her to smile now and then. There should be some cute pictures in there. After that, we went back to the house and hung out for a bit, and Katy took a short but much-needed nap.

That night, we got together with my sisters-in-law (all three of them), my brother-in-law Jason (Mark, my other brother-in-law, had gone out of town on Monday), and my two nephews James and JD and went to Fogo De Chao. How do I love Brazillian steakhouses like Fogo De Chao? Well, as I said to Suzanne during the delicious (if expensive) meal, "If they had beds, I'd live here." To top off the night, Jason had a friend coming into town from San Diego, and so he and his friends had set up a Texas Hold'Em game later that night, which he invited me to. I went along, and met up with a great bunch of guys, played poker until midnight and just had a lot of fun. I lost $20 and went out third of nine players, but I did knock one player out when my pocket Kings beat his pocket 10s, and for my second-ever game of Texas Hold'Em, I don't think that's too bad.

Part of what made this a vacation is that I didn't read any comics or Internet the entire time I was gone. I know that sounds like a weird qualifier for a vacation, but seriously, I read comics every day and read the Internet every day, and aside from checking email for any emergencies, I skipped all that while I was away and it was nice. Of course, every week I skip in reviews adds a week or two onto the other end, and I'm still playing catchup on RSS and email too, but it was nice. Makes me think I might like to take a bit longer off from reviewing, if only for a little while.

At any rate, good weekend.