I’ve been especially busy at work lately so that’s been eating up hours that I could be doing things at home, such as sitting down with Mr. Karen and planning our vacations. I know we’re blessed to have problems like the jobs that make it possible for us to travel interfering with discussing when and where to go. But this is my journal, so it’s my problems I talk about, no matter how trivial. Thus, whining about vacation planning, which we finally made some progress on this past weekend. We’ve got a big wedding anniversary coming up this year, our 25th, and to me that’s an important milestone to celebrate. For a while now, I’ve had it in my head that we’d go to Hawaii, the one state neither of us has ever been to, but Mr. Karen had the better idea that we’d save Hawaii for the year we both turn 50, so we can go to the 50th state when we’re 50 years old—I cannot adequately express how much that concept delights me ( if I could, I’d probably make myself sound odder than I already do), so Hawaii is out for this year. Months ago, we talked about returning to Paris, where we went to celebrate our 10th anniversary (I was going to say 15th, because it doesn’t seem that long ago, but it has to be because I was working for the auto supplier at the time—which I remember because I got back to work to find that one of my employees took a job in another department while I was gone, and she said she would have talked to me about it but she didn’t realize I was going to Paris so she couldn’t call me—and I left there more than 10 years ago). But the Paris plan never got beyond generalities; we put off picking dates and deciding what we’d want to see (besides Disney, of course), which made me think we needed to consider some other options. As of now, we’ve decided to go to the Los Angeles area for our anniversary trip. That’s where we spent our honeymoon—it was the farthest west I’d ever been, as well as my first visit to a Disney park—so it’s got sentimental associations for us, and since it’ll take less time and money than going to France would, we’ll be able to fit in a trip to the condo this summer, too. Maybe we’ll finally get to go to Silverwood, which we’ve driven by dozens of times (though almost always when it’s closed for the season). Now we just need to refine our plans enough to be able to start making reservations. When we’ll manage to do that, I’m not sure.