Mad dogs and Englishmen

I have been on vacation this week, after a fashion. For me, vacation usually entails merely working from home, rather than a series of frosty tropical beverages sipped at poolside, but this time I have limited my contact with the office to about two hours a day. It’s been nice.

“So where then,” you might ask, “are all the posts? Why aren’t you writing?” The truth is that I am trying to take advantage of this time off to get some work down around my house. So far this week I have taken four car loads of clothing, housewares, and toys to Goodwill. Many, many bags of worthless items have been trashed. Should I have kept the first five years of Wired magazine, the two years of Word Perfect Magazine, the dozens of issues of Playboy? (Okay, I admit, I kept the Playboys. For the articles.) No, they needed to go, and more with them.

All of this activity has necessitated going out during the day, something which I do not often experience during the work week. My job keeps me in a windowless Civil Defense bunker from morning ’til night, so toiling in the sight of the Burning Sky God is an unfamiliar and tiring sensation. Once I’ve put in a few hours of that, I need to rest, which has lead to the occasional nap, and as I am really unaccustomed to sleeping during the day, it puts me right off my game.

Friends from other parts of the country (or world) ask me how I can live in South Florida and not spend all my time at the beach or in the sun. I suppose we all end up in places we don’t expect, and we’re not always in a position to appreciate the unique features of our environment. AT the moment I’m exercising my reference for experiencing the unique features of my environment through a window.

Hey, compared to work, just having a window is a vacation unto itself.