Clean Living, Revisited

Ok, maybe a few people took me too literally in that last post, but 'clean living' is a pretty nebulous concept with 99 shades of gray in the middle. I won't be giving up cigars, booze, late-night hot tub adventures (although, there wasn't much adventure going on there), ogling the cocktail waitresses, or the occasional lunch at Grimaldi's with my boy Lars.

I'm just sayin' that it's nice to be back in my own bed, not living out of a suitcase, not eating a club sandie from room service every day (damn we ordered a lot of those...), and not having to worry about a gambling bankroll.

Sometimes dull is good, and right now, I'm cool with it. I've got another day-and-a-half before my vacation ends, and if I don't do anything but catch up on sleep and burn through all the crap on my DVR, then I'm ok with it. This past week was a helluva good time, but I need to decompress a little. I remember after the 'original' March Madness gathering, how awful it was that after spending six days in Vegas acting like a drunken fool, I got home from the airport around midnight, and then had to be back at work at 8:00 am the next day. Oh good lord never again!

And the past two years, I've only taken partial time off during the festivities, so I kind of had to temper my participation, knowing that at night I'd have to be back at work. Not this time, baby--I enjoyed it to the fullest and I'm recovering nicely knowing that I did it "right". It was a true vacation, even though I was never more than 15 miles from home.

And I still have a couple of cigars in the humidor, and a shelf so full of booze that I can't find room for all of the bottles--some have had to take up residence on top of the fridge. So I'll have to indulge at some point, but it'll be in a more relaxing manner. Luckily, I actually came out a few hundred bucks ahead this year, so I got a jump on the month's expenses, filled my gas tank, bought some groceries, purchased some new work clothes, and with the last $15 or so, I bought a set of martini glasses. So tonight, I shall enjoy the nice weather outside, sipping a proper Bombay Sapphire martini, with a spritz of dry Vermouth and a couple of olives, while smoking the last of my Cuban cigars. And try to figure out just at what point I became my grandfather...

Mikey