Vacation, vacation

The life of a dangerous writer is not all sweat, blood, and toil. In fact, the month of July has been pretty much taken up with seeing to the welfare of out-of-school kids (this includes building daily bonfires and watching endless "shows" on our deck. All three of my joeys are thespians, it seems, and the littlest one is getting in on the act with daily performances of either Scooby Doo or Jack Sparrow.)

Why Jack Sparrow, you might ask. Because we spent ten days in the capital of Disneyana, a.k.a. Orlando. The reason we went there in the first place merits a novella, one which you will not be reading here. We groaned and moaned about much preferring to be in Hawaii, but in the end made the best of things and were all real troupers going round the parks: Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios. The ace in the hole, however, was Islands of Adventure over at Universal. We, in the company of forty thousand others, descended on the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which sent my 7-year-old into paroxysms of delight. Hogwarts castle was magnificent and Hogsmeade was a splendid replica--just a pity about all those sweaty muggles clumping about. My advice to anyone planning to go: wait till October. Heck, wait till next year.

(Here we all are, waiting for our letters to Hogwarts)

Now we're back home, the kids are all in camp/summer school, and I have been getting oodles of writing down. Not for long though: we're off at the end of next week for Vancouver, B.C. If anyone has any recommendations about this supposedly wonderful spot, I'd love to hear about them.