Happy weekend a little early, everyone!  I hope you all have fun plans.  Personally, I am taking a break.  I am heading off to a “digital detox” where I go completely off the grid for the weekend.  No email, no smartphone, no blogging/instagramming/tweeting/ facebooking/screentime of any kind (they even are prohibiting me from using my 1960s analog film camera if you can believe that – it doesn’t even have batteries!!).  I read about this digital detox in the New York Times one fine Sunday (I tend to read the NYT every Sunday) and I was intrigued.  (I think the NYT has quite a fascination with the Bay Area, but c’est la vie, they do find things to do here and report on them, and color me okay with that.)  I got email on the later side of it’s invention – sometime circa 1999, a few years after everyone I knew was already making plans that way, and I became instantly hooked.  The internet has remained for me the proverbial blessing and curse — I love that I can look up anything and find anything and I don’t need to actually really know anything, it’s all online.  Everything.  That said, I haven’t “turned it off” in over a decade.  Every single day since my first dial-up moment, I have looked at the internet.  Some days I’ve been too busy to do much with it other than take a passing glance at the messages that come in, but I have always looked.  I am quite curious to find out what happens when I don’t look for a few days.  My friends think I’m bananas to do this, and they have all offered to let me pay them to take away my phone for the weekend.  But I know that won’t work.  I need to go somewhere quiet, somewhere where I really will be away from it all.  So that’s what I’m doing.  If you need me, I’ll write back next week, and I think we’ll all survive a few days of being disconnected.  In the meantime, if you’re still reading the internet this weekend, here’s what’s interested me lately:
* Breakfast Club trivia!  (Don’t you forget about me . . . – it’s in your head now, I know it!)
* I so want to stay at the Madrona Inn – huge fan of over-the-top kitsch I am.
* Finally, giving Sex & the City the respect it deserves.  Best show on television of all time.
* The 16 habits of extremely happy people.  (Good stuff.)
* The world just keeps getting better and better.  Now there is a company that is combining the “cool factor” of staying in an apartment when traveling with the “nice factor” of staying in a hotel (fluffy towels, nice sheets) and getting rid of the potential for being scammed with vacation rentals.  I am definitely bookmarking this site.

Have a great weekend, everyone!  See you on the flip side.