About a week ago, I was on vacation. In between going with my girls to the waterpark in our hotel and having my fingers and toes permanently wrinkled from being in the pool for a week, I got to do a few things I don’t normally get to do.

Doing things you don’t normally get to do is the point of this post — but I’ll get to that in a second.

First, you should know that in my family genealogy is a really big deal. My grandmother and mother were obsessed with tracking down our family history. They were kind of like D.A.R. groupies throughout most of my childhood.

We were the family that actually visited cemeteries on vacation, and took home rubbings of tombstones. I’m not kidding.

I know, it’s a little weird.

Anyway, I have piles and piles of family records in my bedroom closet (it seems disrespectful to put all this in the basement — I know, weird again).

So on the day we got back from vacation, still freshly bathed in the feeling of having time on my hands, I shipped my kids off to their Godmother and my husband off to a baseball game and did something wild and wacky.

Are you picturing it? The dance music… the disco ball… the keg…

That’s right, I whipped out my credit card and joined ancestry.com (and the dance music, disco ball and keg are all in your head, sweetie).

For nearly seven hours, I was in heaven. In the first hour or so, I entered the notes I’d inherited from my grandmother. I thought how nice it was to have things readable rather than scrawled in her fourth-grade-teacher handwriting. It looked cool.

That’s when things got spicy.

You see, ancestry.com is like playing the slot machines with your family’s history. Seriously, you can’t stop. Just when you satisfy your curiosity about one great-great-great somebody, one of those silly little leaves come up next to another name.

So of course you have to go check it out. Then another. And another.

Next thing I knew, the kids and the hubby were home staring at me, and I was in the exact same position I was in when they’d left.

Seven. Hours. Later.

They thought it was kind of strange — after all, they have all been spared from the years of cemetery-hopping vacations and sitting by the door waiting for the UPS guy to deliver the latest “hot” book on Martha’s Vineyard’s early settlers.

But I had a marvelous time. I found out all kinds of obscure and completely irrelevant things. One of my ancestors was French — thus completely explaining my addiction to French fries!

Another was named Prudence, and her mother was named Experience — now that, my friends, was a difficult pregnancy.

My own grandmother appeared on a census as “Rose”, even though her name was really “Ida”… I can see her now, probably answering the questions for the entire family because everybody else was too busy, and deciding to change her name right there and then to something she liked.

This is definitely not an ad for ancestry.com (in fact, I didn’t even link to the site because that’s not the point). Instead, this post is a way to share with you how much fun it can be to totally and completely immerse yourself in a hobby. I let time and worries fade into the background, didn’t worry about the clock, and left my email unchecked.

It was awesome.

As I write this, I’m wondering, do you have a hobby that you can lose yourself in? I hope you’ll take a moment to share — I’d love to hear from you!