About six months ago, our friends announced that they were having a destination wedding.

“Awesome!” we said.

It was going to take place in Turks and Caicos, they informed us.

“Where in the world is that?” we asked. (It’s right here.)

The date would be the end of April.

“April?!?” we joked. “Why not during January when the weather is crappy?”

(HAHAHHAHAA. It is snowing as I type this — on May 3 — because OF COURSE IT IS.)

So we went, and it was lovely, and I already told Jason I am saving all of my money to go back because it was the best vacation I’ve ever had.

After months and months and months of looking out the windows to see white and gray and brown (accompanied by seething rage whenever I viewed the “spring” weather forecast), I was blown away by our view once we got to the island:

The first day, we toured the resort:

Is this a pawn? A knight? A rook? Who knows?! This is why I play cribbage.

Before the wind picked up in the afternoon, we spent our mornings at the beach:

Please note that I do not normally have cleavage, but I found the perfect swimsuit that makes me feel amazing.

The best part of the trip was swimming in the ocean with Jason and a few friends. All of a sudden, I heard a noise like someone flipping book pages. I turned around, and saw dozens of tiny, silver fish skipping across the surface of the water. So cool.

I went snorkeling twice. Jason had never snorkeled before, so I gave him a quickie lesson and we clumsily flippered our way past a coral reef. After awhile, we went our separate ways (because I kept inadvertently kicking him and he couldn’t understand my gurgled cries of, “There’s some fish right below us!”). I saw so many fish; the water was so clear, you could see all the way to the bottom.

My favorite was the stoplight parrotfish.

Hello, friend! (Photo from here.)

I followed a couple of parrotfish around the reef for a good 15 minutes, talking to them underwater the entire time (partly because I was so charmed by them and wanted them to like me, and partly because I was hoping my nonstop chatter would keep any sharks or barracudas away, especially since another snorkeler tapped me on the shoulder and said, “There’s a barracuda about 10 feet to your left!” To which I thought, “Then I will be swimming speedily to my right.” Also, word to the wise: If you are snorkeling, please do not tap another person on their shoulder, especially if they are having a weird tingly feeling that they are being stalked by a large, toothy, prehistoric sea creature.)

Tangent: Whenever I go snorkeling, I always manage to give myself a mini panic attack. This time, it happened after I saw a bunch of small fish go barreling past me at full speed. As I briefly wondered where they were going, and what they might’ve been swimming from, my brain helpfully supplied all kinds of gruesome scenes from the film Open Water. And that is when Mr. I Saw A Barracuda decided to tap me on the shoulder. I may still not be completely recovered.

At one point, my mask started to fog up, so I removed it, spit on the goggles and re-adjusted it. When I stuck my head back underwater, three yellowtail snappers were right in front of me. I could’ve touched them if I wanted to (I did not). I waved my hands to shoo them away and they sat there, floating silently and unblinking. That wasn’t creepy AT ALL.

BACK OFF, CREEPERS. (Photo from here.)

When I finally caught up with Jason on shore, he triumphantly told me that he saw a giant stingray with a tail that was at least six feet long. Grah.

In the afternoons, when the wind picked up and the sun became unbearable, we retreated to the pool with some friends:

Not pictured: the 300 strawberry daiquiris I consumed.

The whole vacation was incredibly relaxing. Because we didn’t want to worry about roaming charges, we shut off our phones before we arrived. And it was amazing to not have to worry about anything. We were unreachable! Suck on that, real life! I’m a ghost! My mind was completely, utterly blank. It was lovely.

Ahhh…

Surprisingly, even though I grazed at the buffet like a starved wildebeest, I didn’t gain an ounce. I assume it was because I always started with a plate of fresh fruit. My fruit intake seriously increased by 1,057%. (My Mountain Dew intake was zero, but I happily swapped it for those aforementioned strawberry daiquiris.)

Jason even tried some new foods. He discovered that he loves mahi-mahi, which we had at the rehearsal dinner, located at the perfect spot overlooking the ocean:

Please ignore my tan line and focus instead of what my stick-straight hair does when not confronted with temperatures that suck. Slight beachy waves from literally 4 minutes of work and no hair product! I desperately need to live in a warm-weather climate.

The wedding was beautiful. (I won’t post any photos of the bride & groom because it’s not my place, but trust me, they were beautiful as well.)

I highly recommend going on vacation with friends. It worked out well for us, because if Jason wanted to stay out later when I was tired, he could while I went to bed. Win-win.

Oh, yeah: I promised Jason I would nap in this before we left. I didn’t, so now we have to go back. Ha ha, a loophole!

How about you guys? How did you spend your time last week?

There is something about February that just feels off. I can’t put my finger on it, but the month just feels mean. Petty. Spiteful. It’s stupid, I understand this, and yet, I feel it just the same.

Work has been incredibly busy. I cannot believe the amount of work that’s been coming in and the expected due dates. What’s that? You need 90 pages of website content? But you don’t yet have the wireframes to give me? Or the general hierarchy or navigation? Or even a rough idea of how you want the site to work? And you need it in 8 days? NO. That’s like telling me to build an airplane while we’re already in the air. Luckily, my boss has been completely awesome by serving as the metaphorical dragon at the gate, so I have been able to shovel off some of those stress projects. (They’ll probably be assigned to Future Shauna, but I cannot allow myself to think about that.)

Speaking of shoveling, it has snowed here five days in a row. Not a lot, but enough to shovel. Jason has done most of it because he gets home before I do (despite working 10-hour days), but this morning I offered to do it before work so he didn’t have to deal with it last night. And this morning, just like every other time I shovel, I reach that point where I just feel the futility of it all. Maybe it’s the sickly blue light, maybe it’s the ice ruts my shovel always gets caught on that results in a shovelful of snow spraying everywhere, or maybe it’s the soggy scarf wrapped wetly across my face. Regardless, I always end up totally fatigued, mentally and physically: I shoveled, but what does it matter? It’s going to snow again and all of this will have been for nothing. What is the point?!? 

See? February strikes again.

Completely unrelated, our volleyball team is this ragtag group of women out to have fun, and our tallest player is maybe 5’9. But yet we always seem to play super-serious, super-competitive teams consisting of 4 or 5 giantesses. Last night, our group was warming up on our side of the net when a player from the other team decided to practice her serves. Three times she nearly hit one of us and then got mad when we wouldn’t roll her ball back to her, leaving it instead to languish in a dusty corner. Sorry we’re not going to hand your ball back to you so you can nearly bean one of us, OK? Don’t effing serve the ball when there’s a group of people standing right there! Jesus. Also on her team was an Amazon woman (literally, every time this creature spiked the ball, she’d utter a primal scream like a cavewoman) who got on my nerves instantly. Luckily, despite being a foot taller than everyone else, she wasn’t that good. Most of the time, she’d hit the ball into the net or out of bounds, and in one deliciously awesome moment that I took way too much pleasure in, she got blocked by one of my teammates. But during those rare instances when she got in a good hit, that yelling instantly made me hate her. Look, I’m all about making good plays, you know? In fact, my main goal when playing volleyball is to annoy the hell out of the other team. But only because of my good play, not because I celebrated like an annoying douchebag. So when the time came to shake hands after the game, instead of saying, “good game,” like I do to every other person, I slapped Amazon’s hand and said nothing. Just my little passive-aggressive way of saying, “Eff you.” And yes, it was petty, and yes, I know the woman had no idea what I was thinking, but I did it.

I’ll blame February.

So, Jason won our 2012 cribbage tournament. Big deal, good for him, this year’s MY year, blah, blah, blah, right?

No. I was ahead in our 2012 tournament for 354 days. Seriously. We played our first game shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, and I won. And then I kept winning, so that – for the entire year – I was ahead of Jason.

And then December 20th happened. He tied me. I thought, “No biggie; there’s plenty of time left.”

And then he kept winning and winning and building more of a lead, and then my thinking went to, “Well, if we play 25 more games and I win 17 of them, it’ll be fine.”

And then he kept winning some more, and I kept becoming more and more angry because seriously! I was ahead ALL YEAR.

During one game, I was getting the most wonderful cards. When I finally paid attention to Jason’s pegs, he was beating me. And I got all incredulous (and whiny) and questioned his obvious cheating strategy, and Jason said, “Why are you so mad?” And I replied, “Because if I was getting crap hands, it would make sense that you’re beating me. But I’m getting awesome hands, and you’re still winning! That’s not fair.” Then I think he called me a sore loser, but I can’t remember because I was too busy pouting.

Finally, with only a few days left in the year, we set down some ground rules because the score was so close. That way, the person who was behind couldn’t keep asking to play more games in the hope of regaining the lead. We decided to play just 10 more games. The only way we’d play more was if the season ended in a tie.

And, well, obviously it didn’t.

Boo.

P.S. Notice how in the last 3-4 years, the font size on the engravings keeps growing larger and larger? Yeah, don’t use Crown Awards if you don’t care for that. (When I first ordered the plaque, I ordered six years of info at once, which is why those are consistent.) But apparently, they don’t keep record of the font size they use on the engravings, so for the past two years, I have had to have them redo it three times. (This year, I even sent them a photo of the size I wanted and specified the correct font size (14.5 serif), and it was still too big.) Not cool when you want to have multiple engravings look the same from year to year.