Sometimes a lazy summer strikes when you least expect it. For a few random days at a time, you’re surrounded by quiet, relaxing doldrums. Your TV schedule loses its pulse. Theater screens are usurped by movies clearly rated NFY (Not For You). Headline news is, if not slow per se, more irrelevant to you than usual. Sometimes a muffin with too many ingredients is the most exciting thing that’s happened to you.

For us this weekend is our last chance to relax before the oncoming July overdrive. Fourth of July weekend, my son will be coming into town for a bit to savor some home-cooked food, endure a movie that hopefully isn’t excruciating for us, and maybe observe the holiday somehow. The week leading up to it, and the week after, will be all about day-job overtime, by which I mean they’ll be ordinary weeks to me.

Weekend after that, my wife and I activate perimeter defenses and embark on our 2014 road trip. This year we’re heading northwest of here through Wisconsin and Minnesota, as a kind of sequel to our 2006 road trip. The endpoint will take us a short distance inside the previously unexplored state of North Dakota, whose southeast area we understand has one or two points of interest for discriminating, oddball travelers like us. Our preliminary research tells us Fargo is nowhere near as mind-blowing as Manhattan, but we aim to make the most of our time there anyway. Hopefully.

During our time-out, I’m planning an ambitious placeholder experiment: a somewhat remastered presentation of the original write-up for our 2006 road trip. Before Midlife Crisis Crossover launched on April 28, 2012, I used to create travelogues (with assistance from my amazing wife) of our annual road trips to share with our internet peers, each one a combined writing exercise and community entertainment project. I’ve wanted to bring those and other previous internet writing projects under the MCC aegis for some time now, but I’ve had a hard time finding relevant reasons to work them into the schedule. Not to mention that, for me at least, editing and reprinting aren’t nearly as fun as writing new entries from scratch.

That said, I’ve been thinking it would be awfully swell if I could use at least some of my vacation week for actual relaxation, instead of typing twice as much on the road as I do back home. For anyone who didn’t know me prior to MCC, all of this will be never-before-seen material that I hope you’ll enjoy. For longtime friends and colleagues who knew us back in the good ol’ days, I’ll be doing some light “special edition” Lucas-zing — fixing some typos and poor word choices; throwing in a few extra photos from our archives; adding some present-day annotations as special bonus features; and double-checking with my wife as to whether or not the one swimsuit photo can stay or go.

After all that comes August, which will contain GenCon and Wizard World Chicago. So half that month’s effectively spoken-for.

But all that’s weeks away. Until then, here we are — the muffin, the meantime, and me.

(And it just figures: what I’d envisioned as a serene, single-photo, single-paragraph interlude turned into a 500-word sneak preview of future busyness and housekeeping. This sort of uncontrolled excess is why I’ll never get to be world-famous. Sorry about that. Please enjoy the muffin photo anyway and feel free to pretend these other paragraphs never happened.)