Shut it Off Now or the Blackberry Gets It

We leave for a week of beach time soon and while I'm busy packing and making list after crazy list on all the things we need to bring on this hopefully blissful beach side vacation, I am also in the process of powering down.  Yes, I am bringing my laptop with me while away but I've already set up my work email to vacation status.  The laptop is for short intervals of loading work onto sites and that is all.  I'm busy this week doing the advance work and while I'm away posts will load up automatically, I hope.  Add to the list that I have already been shutting off the drone of the media to get myself ready and I think I will be set for a total mind and body vacation. 

Instead of watching TV on my laptop while getting dressed or listening to NPR or some loud, crass morning disc jockey I've been trying to enjoy the silence. 

H took the girls to the spray grounds the other day and instead of watching TV to relax I just shut everything off and read a magazine in full without interruption.  OK, so a nap interrupted the reading but it was so nice to hear only the sound of the A/C buzzing and not the noises of The City or The Hills in the background. 

I feel the need to do this now so it won't be such a shock to the system when I bring my phone but leave it in my purse almost all week so I can be free from reading Facebook statuses like, "I mowed the whole yard today."  Awesome. Good for you.  I needed to spend five minutes learning that because, why?  Or tweeting that I just ate a gigantic ice cream cone when no one cares, except my thighs. 

All this powering down has gotten to me too, but not in the way you would think.  As H and I watched a show that had literally been in our DVR for a year plus I could hear a gentle tip-tapping sound in the background.  The commercials silently fast-forwarded by and it got louder and more insistent.  He was texting.  There in the dark, while watching this show, every time we had a two minute interval the tippy-tap-tap sound would begin again.  It made me a bit twitchy at first. Then irritable, "Can't you just stop checking Facebook for more than fifteen minutes?  Is fantasy baseball really that important?!" Then I got angry.  I wanted to shout, "If that was me doing that, you would ask me to stop!" And it would be in an irritable voice too, not nicely.  I wanted to chuck the phone out the door and officially cut him off now.   But I didn't. I just quietly seethed in the dark thinking, "If that phone comes out next week and it's not some sort of emergency it might just be making new friends next to some hot dogs on a grill or literally swimming with the fishes."