Lord, beer me strength.

I have a ridiculously childish and self-centered attachment to my annual August lake vacation. Two weeks will never be enough, but neither will three or four. I'd even put up with the fugly cottage art forever. Just don't make me come home and have a real life.

For some reason I'm particularly cranky about having to have a real life this year. Real life people seem to be especially irritating to me this week, and my well-tanned face is already starting to peel. Yesterday at 4 o'clock, I was relentlessly fixated on the fact that at the same time a week ago I was drinking a beer and playing beanbags by the water. I totally couldn't get over it. When I received an e-mail from my mother complaining about having gained 4 1/2 pounds, I realized we have officially moved from "lake complaining" mode to "post-lake complaining" mode, the latter of which may actually be even more obnoxious than the former because it garners even less sympathy.

The term "lake complaints" was coined by someone in my family a couple of years ago, and my uncle has begun recording them for posterity. They are complaints about things that are actually good -- "complaints" that reflect just how spoiled my entire family is for two weeks out of each year. "There's too much sun," is a pretty common one that's been uttered many times -- including by me. (But in that one spot on the deck it is just BRUTAL in the late afternoon and moving the chair is just an awful lot of work -- sometimes there's not even room to move the chair.) But some of my favorite lake complaints have come from the aforementioned uncle, who last year complained that a chunk of chocolate in his ice cream cone was TOO BIG for him to bite through and this year lamented that the improvement of Jefferson County A highway had caused the road to "lose all its charm" without potholes and dangerous curves.

Yes, life is rough for us. Sometimes the motion of the lake water moves our air mattresses around so frequently that we can't even take naps without fear of ending up beached in front of houses 200 yards away.

When you run out of beer, you have to get in your car and drive back to the PartyMart to buy more. It won't just reappear in the refrigerator.

You occasionally have to get your second choice of ice cream flavor because the person in line ahead of you got the last scoop of blueberry cream pie. (There was a fleeting moment during this year's vacation that we thought my mother got the last scoop of that flavor EVER, but they ended up restocking it and the crisis was averted.)

But even with all that adversity we suffer through on vacation, I strongly prefer my vacation time to my non-vacation time. But I realize that my post-lake complaining has crossed the obnoxiousness threshold, and I today seek desperately to quash my case of the grumpies by identifying a few simple transition strategies that might mitigate the harshness of reality. These might include, but are not limited to, proposing a mandatory "beer and beanbags" social hour at work, going on a semi-permanent "staycation," and digging a lake in my back yard/petitioning to have my neighborhood rezoned such that all my neighbors must convert their homes into taverns and ice cream shops.

Or I could just try to stop being such a jackass.