My apartment looks like a bomb site.  Don’t tell my mother.

Some months ago, my mother changed her mind about having a family reunion in Sweden when she found that my aunt, who is Vietnamese and married to my mom’s brother, couldn’t get a visa to go over there with her kids. Instead, she booked five cabins at Douthat State Park in central Virginia, a place I’d never heard of but which has been rated (apparently) in the top ten of all state parks in the country.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of my work at the moment, I was only able to make it down there by midday on Friday - and the reservation was up Saturday at 10am. So I hightailed it down to northern Virginia Thursday night, woke up bright and early to a phone call from our CEO (thankfully my alarm was set to go off five minutes later - all part of the job, anyway), and grabbed my cousin for the 200-mile drive down to Millboro.

I spent all the rest of the day swimming, canoeing, and acquiring a rather painful sunburn on my back. We completed the evening with a campfire and s’mores, and you know what? It was perfect. Especially because absolutely no one there got cell reception.

I love stuff like this. It reminds me of my youth, when, every year for ten years, we would spend at least a month of the summer at our family house in Sweden. Even without indoor plumbing, it was an unbelievable experience with swimming, fishing, boating, eating crayfish, and playing guitar and singing late into the night - after all, it’s Sweden in the summertime. It doesn’t get dark, and that’s just cool.

The Brits have come and gone. Our launch at work has come and gone. And it’s taking a lot out of me to get back into the mindset of a ‘normal’ day here in Dirty Jersey.

It was fantastic seeing Becks, Ness, and Neil last week. The first night they were here, we did the standard “I’m jet-lagged and not really up for anything” activity of ordering take-out and watching American Idol. The next night was really the polar opposite. We headed down to Harrah’s in Atlantic City - and may I say that I’m really getting spoiled by free hotel rooms - and spent seven hours, from 10PM to 5AM, playing slot machines. I didn’t think that was possible, that the slots would get really boring, but honestly, with hilarious friends, lots of free alcohol, and a new paycheck burning a hole in your pocket, it’s extremely consuming. I was a wee bit concerned at first when I lost a quick two hundred bucks, but by the end of the night I’d come out about $20 ahead, and breaking even is just as good as winning. Good times.

The Brits spent the weekend in the City, but unfortunately due to the launch at work I was actually stuck at the office all day on Saturday, and felt well exhausted for two days afterwards, so that didn’t happen. They came back on Tuesday and we spent the evening watching a horrendously bad horror film called Rest Stop while munching on pizza and buffalo wings from Pizza Hut, because that was the only thing open past 10pm on a weeknight, apparently. We spent all the next day shopping at Jackson Premium Outlets and then eating at a fabulous New Orleans-style restaurant in New Brunswick called The Old Bay, which serves massive, amazing dishes like blue crap and spinach dip, seafood and sausage gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and seafood jambalaya. Highly recommended if you’re ever in the area, hungry, and willing to spend about 30-40 bucks per person with drinks.

All told, it was a great visit, and it makes me wish London were just a wee bit closer than it is.

The Brits are arriving tomorrow afternoon, and I am well excited. Unfortunately, Murphy’s law had it in for me and decided to push our huge announcement(s) at work to, you guessed it, a week from today, which means that the majority of the next seven days will be spent at the office rather than using up my vacation days to spend time with them.

That being said, the craziness going on at work is enormously (dare I say it?) gratifying, despite some serious to-do lists. With the departure of our creative director, I’ve found myself the sole designer of many pieces of collateral, which means entertaining myself with Photoshop tricks and scrounging through various repositories of stock photography. Honestly, I often wonder why I didn’t do graphic design at college; it’s always been a habit/passion of mine. Anyway, things are turning out very nicely, my to-do list is growing steadily smaller, and the light can be seen at the end of the tunnel. Plus, the icing on the cake was seeing a case study I wrote some months ago published in an industry magazine this week. I know my mother will be so proud.

Because of everything, I’ve decided to forgo sleep for the foreseeable future in exchange for getting my stuff done at work during the day and playing with the Brits at night. Atlantic City is still definitely in the cards, as is spending quite a bit of time in New York. I hear the Easter parade is quite a trip, and the Brits mentioned wanting to see a show or two while they’re here.

I am officially not bothered by the fact that I’m still in the office at 7PM. This could be because I know I have a bathroom and a kitchen to clean when I get home, and who really looks forward to that kind of thing?

I figured I’d finish up my lunch break by posting an update. If you visit this regularly, you’ll note that the template keeps changing. I think I’m going to settle on this one, though. I like the blue-gray-black look. Very sleek.

Meg and I celebrated our two-year (!!) anniversary on the 13th, and she treated me to a weekend at Harrah’s in Atlantic City. Unfortunately luck wasn’t on my side, but Meg was making money everywhere - video poker (she got four Ace’s - who does that??), penny slots (all I could hear was “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding” over and over again, and her first ever poker game with real poker players and real money. So she was happy, and because she was happy I was happy, and it was just a great weekend. As much time as we spend together during the week, it’s a nice change when we can go away for a time and leave behind phones, computers, work, etc., just spending time together.

Becks and Ness, two of my good friends from university, have booked their flights over to the States for a ten-day visit over Easter weekend in March. I’m so excited! Undoubtedly AC will be on the cards that week as well, because I can’t see either of them turning down free alcohol; plus, it’s just a fun place to be.

In other news, I feel really strange and surprisingly upset about the death of Heath Ledger. I think it’s because it was so unexpected - he was young, clean, a new father, and, from what I gathered from interviews, quite a nice guy. It’s just a shame, really. 10 Things I Hate About You, the movie that I watched nearly every day my freshman year in college, will never be the same.