I was in Michigan last week, nine days of lying on the beach, eating grilled meat, playing golf and beach volleyball and drinking to my heart’s content, or maybe a little past that point. I actually got back from vacation exhausted, like I needed a few ten hour workdays to really wind down and relax.

I guess I’m still like a kid in that sense – for me, vacation is like recess for me. I get out of where I’m trapped all day every day working, and for a specific, limited amount of time, I get to do whatever I want as long as I don’t throw up or make anyone cry. And let me ask you this: do you see a lot of first graders lying around the blacktop with a kickball under their heads, or flipping through Calvin and Hobbes while they lounge on the playground’s bouncy bridge like it’s a hammock? No, you don’t.

So I went and I ran around and I got sunburned and cut my feet running through the woods shoeless playing Foxes and Hounds, and bruised and abused myself so that I was physically sore for the whole second half of the week. That’s just how I roll.

And I ate and drank too much, because the food – my goodness, the food. With as many family cooks up there as we had, the food was abundant and delicious. The dinner rundown:

Saturday: Grilled brats, burgers and hot dogs, with whatever accoutrements
Sunday: Grilled beef tenderloin
Monday: Barbecued pulled-pork sandwiches
Tuesday: Lasagna
Wednesday: Beer-butt chicken and cheesy cornbread
Thursday: Shrimp, mussels, corn, chorizo sausages
Friday: Grilled whitefish with cherry salsa
Saturday: Grilled pork loin

Oh, you could almost hear us all getting fatter.

On Sunday, before we left, my brother and I were sitting in the car when he decided that it would be fun, if you had a dog, to name the dog a crude or suggestive word. Groper, Fuckstick, Anus, Herpes, Buttplug, Merkin, Phallus the Fister and Whore are a few possibilities.

And now I’m back, sitting at work, and it seems somehow fitting that the list of names keeps running through my mind. Over and over and over again.