According to our friend and colleague Anjeanette Damon, ace political reporter for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Gov. Jim Gibbons took off on vacation last week to Cabo San Lucas, and nobody really knew anything about it.

Oh, he told some people. Like Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki, for example. Krolicki is technically the governor while Gibbons is out of state. Thus far, it doesn’t appear Krolicki signed any executive orders taking money set aside for Gibbons’ high-tech Jack Bauer Commander-in-Chief Operations Center Play Set and use it to print cocktail napkins with Krolicki’s photo on them. But we’re still checking that out.

But Gibbons didn’t tell many other people. And Damon’s question — did anybody notice the governor was gone? — is a good one.

How could you tell? Well, one way is to check if any really qualified people were kicked off boards or commissions by the guy whose other job is getting Gibbons’ Chief of Staff Mike Dayton coffee. That would be one way.

Another way is to see if anybody had signed off on a really, really stupid hiring/firing/appointment decision made by Business & Industry boss Mendy Elliott. Anybody got anything there?

We suppose you could tell if there were no meetings with foreign government officials, after which a totally fake policy announcement was made. Like, for example, if there were nobody to say the prime minister of Canada is willing to pay for all expatriate Canadians’ cable TV bills or something.

Or wait. Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. What if instead of looking for things that didn’t happen up here, we were to check things that did happen down in Cabo San Lucas? For example, what if, on a rainy weekday night, a pretty Mexican cocktail waitress was allegedly assaulted by a gringo walking her to her car? Now that might be proof of gubernatorial vacation, right? Let’s give a call down to the Cabo PD and see what we can turn up.