Friday, At Last.

It's Friday.

It's Friday and the weekend that my children are with their father.

It's Friday, the weekend my children are with their father AND it's warm enough to ride.

I am positively giddy.

Every time that I look out my office window, I get a little shiver of joy.


The past couple of weeks have been hugely busy. At work, deals have finally come together which is great, except the details are time consuming and never ending. I'm grateful, though. It's been a long sixteen months putting together one of my projects and I plan to celebrate like a pirate.

This week also found my husband in the office of his division VP who told him that he has been identified as rising talent and would he consider moving to fast track his career? Neither one of us saw that one coming. More on that later.

For the past twenty some odd days, I have been spending every spare minute trying to find a place for us to holiday. The last two years, we have been fortunate enough to use timeshare points through my sista cousin and her husband. This year, in the middle of an economic downturn, everything was booked solid. Weird. So, Ash and I started to panic a bit. Finding a place became paramount.

We looked at the Gulf Shores because the beaches are fantastic, the prices reasonable and the drive wouldn't be too taxing. The only problem was the weather. Iffy, at best. The last thing in the world that I wanted to experience on spring break was goosebumps. So, we scrapped the Gulf Shores and turned our attentions to the central Florida Gulf Coast instead.

I'm sure that with a little planning, this would have been a good option but at the last minute, most everything was booked and those properties that weren't had issues. Like price. One agent told me she had a great deal on a three bedroom, two bath place. It was just shy of $3000, plus cleaning fee, plus booking fee, plus extra to heat the pool and jacuzzi, plus security, PLUS tax. When it was all said and done, we were knocking on $5000. Eight people in a shoebox-sized condo looked less like a holiday and a whole lot like work. So we declined.

This past Tuesday, I was becoming seriously worried. My Aunt Bev sent over a website but I didn't hold out much hope because I'd been to just about every URL that had beach in the title with no luck whatsoever.

And then it appeared.

A large, four bedroom villa near the beach.

Two master bedrooms, huge heated pool, great location and every amenity one could imagine. It was available. And inexpensive. I called the UK to get it booked. Did I mention how reasonable the prices were? Dallas asked if there was some catch.

"Are you sure the prices are in US dollars and not British pounds?" he asked. I understood his trepidation. Too good to be true syndrome.

But it wasn't and two weeks from today, we'll be heading down to Florida with my sista cousin and her family.

It's Friday, and the weekend that my children are with their father and it's warm enough to ride, and my deal came together and we got our vacation booked. Life is good.

If I close my eyes, I can already smell the salt in the air.