Clarification and context

Just so that last posting doesn't make me sound like the biggest whiney-pants ingrate ever, there are a few things I didn't have time to mention:
 
1. As well as homeschooling, teaching some other homeschooled kids, editing the magazine, and taking care of an allergy-intensive household, I'm the onsite manager for our apartment building. This keeps our rent low, which is good. It's also usually not much work. However, right before we left on this trip -- which incidentally is the first time we've been away for literally years -- we had a vacancy in the building. So on top of getting the magazine to the printers, home, and out to subscribers, and getting ready for the trip, I had to show the vacant apartment to any and all comers. We really needed to get the place filled before we left. Which, miraculously, we did. Except that the management company -- the people who took over bookkeeping and other chores when the owner, my husband's uncle, retired -- messed up with getting the keys to the new tenant. So now they keep calling and leaving messages on our home phone. Which is adorable, since back when we were IN TOWN we couldn't get them to return a single phone call, about the keys or anything else. Now we're thousands of miles away -- and they KNEW we were taking this trip, we're with one of the building's owners, for heaven's sake -- they need someone to blame for screwing up, and all of a sudden all they want to do is chat. So does the new tenant, since he doesn't know what's going on and he just wants to be able to get into his new apartment. Which I'd love to help him with, but it's not as if I can just zip home and straighten everything out for him. So even if Disney World were my idea of paradise, it's really hard to relax and feel as if I'm on vacation when the most unpleasant aspects of the least favorite of all my jobs keeps following me around here.

2. I'm constantly short of sleep, because my husband is, to put it gently, a very audible sleeper. I have a white noise machine and the strongest ear plugs in history, but it's not enough by a long shot. At home, we're either in separate rooms or he's using a sleep apnea machine, which he couldn't bring with him on this trip. So between his involuntary noisemaking and my son, Sir Kicks A Lot, who's bunking with me because he gets insecure when we travel, I'm getting almost no sleep. It's been days. I'm flippin' exhausted.

3. My mother-in-law is a good, kind person. However, early in my marriage, we butted heads a LOT. I learned some patience, which helped matters a little. My husband's sister married someone who made my mother-in-law realize just how lucky she actually was in the daughter-in-law department, which helped matters a LOT. I homeschool her vegetarian grandson and cook for her son, who is currently allergic to tomatoes, vinegar, cultured milk, chocolate, all fruits, pumpkin, and alcohol -- and he's allergic enough that he can't even be around these foods if they're cooking. I may be a little sharp at times, but I keep everyone alive and well and fed according to their needs and philosophies. So she's much easier on me than she used to be. But we're talking years of some very rough times. As good as my intentions are, I find it incredibly difficult not to have all my defenses up around her, because I was pretty constantly under attack for a very long time and the aftermath of that doesn't just go away overnight. Spending days with her in this kind of proximity is an emotional workout for me.

4. I don't like to travel in general, and I'm a loner, and I don't like Disney. I've traveled thousands of miles from home, with almost no alone or down time, and am living in nonstop Disney madness.

5. If I ever do want to travel, I want to go somewhere that ISN'T DISNEY, and we can't afford to do that any time soon. We couldn't have ever paid for even a fraction of this trip -- in fact, we've had two bill collectors call while we were here, which ratchets my tension levels up even higher.

5a. Our last two vacation trips were here -- my husband has a web site that's pretty popular, a Disney satire site, and he can write off coming here on our taxes because it's research.

5b. I got a bad sinus infection the first time we came here; the last time we came here, I got another bad sinus infection plus we all got violently ill from a nasty flu virus that swept the hotel. Oddly enough, I don't have wonderful associations with staying at Disney World.

6. I also don't have typical ideas of "fun." I'm a work-oriented, book-oriented person. I want to be at home, mailing out the current issue of the magazine and working on the next one. If I'm "relaxing," I’d love to hike or exercise all day, come home around teatime, and spend the rest of the evening reading. Just to let you know what my idea of a really good time is: I brought Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd with me on this trip. My mother-in-law gave me some spending money and I've managed to find and purchase four books in what, I think we can all agree, is not a particularly bookish corner of the globe -- a collection of Irish fairy tales (from Epcot's "U.K."), a book about wild cats (from our hotel, the Animal Kingdom Lodge), Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild, by Susan McCarthy (from Wild Animal Kingdom), and The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts, an 18th-century Japanese classic by Issai Chozanshi, translated by William Scott Wilson (from Epcot's "Japan"). I've had almost no time to myself, but I've still managed to finish reading two of the books I brought with me. And I've also managed to put a dent in The Origin of Species and The Cambridge Companion to The Origin of Species, because I'd be even insaner than I already am if I didn't have the feeling I was getting something accomplished on this trip.

7. One week after we get home is my birthday, and I'd been really hoping to go to the Huntington or the Norton Simon Museum -- but we can't unless it's on a weekend, when they'll be crowded and icky, because my husband used up all his vacation days on this trip.

So: sorry for all the screaming last time, but I hope that this helps it all make a bit more sense.