My last vacation adventure started with a 19-hour-four-airport-plus-an-impromptu-four-hour-drive-with-total-strangers nightmare commute

This vacation adventure is starting with no Diet Coke in the you’re-trapped-here-and-this-is-your-only-option-I-hate-my-job-so-I’m-going-to-mumble-at-you-that’ll-be-shrvkorsln-dollars-please airport-gate kiosk.

I don’t know which is worse. All I can say is the damn Lusitania better not sink at the end of this book.

Also: Our gate agent just told us we have “free wi-fi available for purchase” on our flight.

Plus she just said we’re now boarding for our flight to Charlotte O’Hare.

Plus she pronounces it conci-air.

This commute is immeasurably worse.

Well, shit

When you get home from an amazingly awesome vacation and you set down your painstakingly-filled-by-your-mother container of bipolar meds divided into an entire week of morning and evening handfuls of pills and it slips and lands face-down on the carpet and pops open and basically her worst nightmare explodes right before your eyes ...

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

Costume fitting night!

Under every "Singin’ in the Rain" trench coat hides a soul of pastel sequin nightmares.

Our long family nightmare is over

Finally confident that the Revolutionary War has ended and that busybody Paul Revere isn’t going to one-if-by-land unannounced at our door to double-check how we’re serving our tea, we’ve packed up (most of, save for a few stubborn souvenirs) our Ye Olde Enormouse Collectione of Pfaltzgraff Yorktowne dishes and sent them off to an undisclosed Louisiana Purchase location. So goodbye, hard-to-stack-and-remarkably-heavy faux stoneware! And hello, lightweight, stackable, versatile, chic, plain-white and easily-replaceable-in-a-pinch Crate & Barrel Aspen dinnerware! Also: Hello, extra cupboard space! Also: Larger Aspen serving pieces make a lovely gift!

Dare to have dreams. And strive to achieve them.

The dawn of a golden age of atheism

Ah, America's modern-day Kennedys: dynamic thinkers and style icons brimming with youthful idealism and the courtly-but-joyful appearance of domestic marital bliss. Melania keeps the world fashion dialogue in a perpetual state of abuzzment with her signature freshness and coy irony; she wears Armani to a soup kitchen and then the Old Navy Dowager CollectionTM to the Vatican. I think I could totally date her stylist. Ivanka gets points for versatility; her outfit goes effortlessly from afternoon beatings at her Amish sweatshop to a hamster funeral to the Vatican to her nut job (oops -- NIGHT job) as a chimney sweep, and then that corpse sneeze of a veil doubles smartly as a hairnet for her morning shift at the cafeteria in one of Jared's tenements. Donald -- impish, spirited Donald -- would show up to his own funeral (wouldn't THAT be fun?) looking this rakish and disheveled in a tie as crooked as his integrity, a (Saudi? the picture is too small to see for sure) flag pin, workingman's hands bruised from tireless hours perfecting his stroke (and not, as those poorly shot videos seem to imply, from being playfully swatted away by his third (and counting!) wife's bediamonded hands), and a grin as out of place as a shipment of pro-American-jobs hats made in China. We are truly in a golden age that spans the continents from the hotel rooms of Russia to the gilded towers of New York, and this royal family brings a level personal, human connection to everyone rich or poor or especially poorer like no one has ever seen.