I'm very excited about spring break. It's one of those traditions I've sorely missed since graduating and moving to the working world - like buying new sweaters in the middle of August. I have no idea what I'm going to do with all of that time, though. I don't have the money to travel. And I really hope to have more to show for myself than an intimate knowledge of the daytime TV schedule. Maybe I can clean my room.

When I was a kid, we used to drive to Oklahoma on spring break. My great-grandmother lived there. So did various distant relatives who seemed to think my parents fed my brother and me Miracle Grow. ("You've gotten so big!") We had a great time, eating junk food on the road and homecooked meals at great-grandma's. We'd walk from one side of town to the other five or six times. (In Denver, even in the suburbs, you need to have a definite location and be supervised. In a farming community of 5,000, just don't come home until it's time to eat.)

My freshman year of college, I was very excited to continue the spring break tradition with my friends. Several people decided that it would be awesome to spend the week camping in Moab. Now, I'm not a big fan of sleeping in a tent. (I prefer a trailer - off the ground and without bugs.) However, I had high hopes that it would turn out okay. And it did! About a week before we were set to leave, someone thankfully figured out that it's really awful cold in Moab this time of year. So we found a friend of a parent with a timeshare, and stayed in a condo in Breckenridge for the week. We had a fireplace and real beds...although also about 15 people in a two-bedroom condo. It was still awesome.

As cramped as that vacation could have been, it didn't seem as bad as the next year, when spring break hit the blizzard of '03. My last final was a day before the snow came, and my mother insisted that I come home "in case it got really bad." I didn't see the harm. Foolish, foolish. I was snowed in with my family for days. Meanwhile, I'd periodically talk to friends still stuck at school. They were having the time of their lives, building snow forts, making angels, and hiking to Chipotle for sustenance. I had to vacuum the basement. Maybe I'll avoid cleaning something this spring break - it seems to put a damper on the rest of the vacation.