First I should mention that I am on the tech crew of the CMI Concert Choir.  We specialize in presenting Christmas concerts.  Not the usual kind where people just stand on stage and sing, but a fully-realized production, complete with dramatic lighting, dancers, costumes, and a prize-giveaway intermission.  This eats up the first three weekends (Friday through Sunday) of November and leaves me sleepy and groggy during the middle of those weeks when I have to go to work. My mother, who lives with me, curiously never wants to attend the shows, so I let her visit relatives while I'm gone.

Once I have completed the concert series, I have to prepare to go out of town to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.  Since I live in a different city than the rest of my family, this takes extra effort.  In addition I have to go to work during the remaining days, so as you can expect, packing time for both events overlapped each other.  As I'm sure you can imagine, there was much mental tribulation.  Oh, and one more detail:  Over the past few years, I've driven myself down to Disney and did not have to concern myself with airline restrictions (including the famous liquids-in-bottles clause).  Allowing for these limitations caused even more consternation.

I admit that these are normal concerns for anyone going on vacation.  My claim is that things were going... illogically... at work for the previous six months.  Between trying to get used to the NEW definition of "Customer Service" (which appears to be 'spend more time and effort to keep the customer informed that you haven't worked on their problem yet'), and trying to deal with having more emphasis on getting things done with less and less management backing when roadblocks appeared, my brain was a total wreck.  It was all I could do each day to simply get out of bed in the morning.

Okay, that's fine for before the trip, but what WAS the trip?  Well, it was a dream vacation (pardon the pun) to Walt Disney World and the Disney Cruise Line.  What made it possible was something called MouseFest.  MouseFest is a gathering of Disney fan groups from the internet that gives online friends a chance to see the faces of the screen names they have come to know.  I am am member of The Mouse For Less mailing list.  I don't do well on forums where you have to stay online to write your messages.  This is mostly because I'll write four sentences, wander away from the computer, write eight more, wander away, re-write two and write two more wander away, et cetera.