There are times when a laptop computer sure comes in handy.

Such as when a friend is taking you to the airport for a flight out for vacation and you spend the miles between here and there writing your last article for the week.

That’s exactly what happened this past week, when time (as usual) got away from me and it took me longer to get everything done than I anticipated. Thank goodness we had a ride to the airport, because I still had to write the graduation story for Escalon, Vista and El Portal schools, plus do captions for the photos. It had been an inordinately busy week, in my defense, and there was an awful lot to cram in before having to get to the airport.

So it was with great difficulty that I tried to keep the laptop on my lap and write a cohesive story about graduation as we hurtled along I-5 to the Sacramento Airport at 70-something mph. I literally finished the final caption as we were taking the airport exit and got the computer shut down so friend Michelle, who also happens to be a co-worker, could take it back to the paper and they could retrieve my story for the June 11 issue.

Not only that, there were some captions I didn’t get to write for the Sober Grad photos before I left so when our first plane touched down in Las Vegas, I had to call work and dictate those captions to fill-in editor/former reporter Kim Van Meter. Then there were a few follow up texts and phone calls about this, that and the other thing for the June 11 papers and my daughter was giving me the evil eye the whole time, lamenting that we were ON VACATION and I needed to STOP WORKING.

The week of graduation is always busy, with all schools wrapping things up and having special activities to be covered, followed by the actual graduation ceremonies and then the fun of volunteering at and getting photos of Escalon’s festive Sober Grad night.

As always, things seem to get done, even if they’re completed a little later and in a more unorthodox manner than planned.

Thanks to Michelle, we got to the airport in time to catch our flight and were lucky enough not to have to take our shoes off to go through security. Two planes and 3,000 miles later it was time to relax and enjoy the fast-paced world of vacation. We are packing plenty in to our time here and enjoying the lush green of upstate New York – complete with some rainfall and thunderstorms, always an enjoyable diversion from the often triple digit Central Valley summer heat. I will be back to work soon enough, so for now, I will simply work on doing what I want when I want; the true freedom of vacation.