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On Vacation

I’m on vacation this week–not the kind of vacation where we all jump in the car and drive to warmer parts of the continent, but the kind of vacation that allows me to just stay around the house and do what I love to do–hang out with the family and read good books. I guess they now call this a staycation. I’m on a serious history kick these days, reading biographies and histories of World War 2. Great stuff. As much as I enjoy reading all the Christian books, I still love to read history most of all. Michael Korda’s Hero was a fantastic biography of an eccentric British war hero while Berlin at War is essentially the biography of the city during the Second World War. I’m also slowly working my way through John Keegan’s The Second World War, the first general history I’ve read in quite a few years.

Obviously, unlike my last vacation, this is not a digital vacation like I took last summer where I headed to the middle of nowhere, far away from cell towers and Internet and other trappings of a digital world. But I am trying to be on the computer less, to check email less, and so on. Because that allows me to be more fully present with my family.

Yesterday I took the family to see the movie Tangled in 3D. It was a good one–lots of fun and without all the subtle (or not-so-subtle) adult humor that’s become a part of too many kids’ movies. The 3D was well-done; far better than it was in Up which is, I believe, the last one we saw in 3D. They charged us $10 to see the movie and that price included the glasses. At the end they encouraged us to recycle the glasses so we could do our bit for the environment. I decided to keep mine just out of spite for the prices they charge us. Whenever I go to a movie I find it hard to believe that they can actually convince me to part with $23 in exchange for 2 bags of popcorn and 2 cups of Coke, which all together can’t cost them more than $0.50. It’s depressing.

As for the rest of the week, we really do not have a lot of plans. We’ll mostly just hang around the house, I think, taking it easy. And that sounds awfully good to me.


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