Tanning in the Park

The warm weather of recent mornings makes me think of previous summers and what might come this year. At the moment I don't have any real definite plans for the summer, but I doubt that it will compare with last summer. Last year at this time I was planning on going to Hawaii for the first time. This meant that I would be getting away from everything for a week. There would be no cares and no worries, it would be me just being a tourist. It was all very freeing.

Going to Hawaii was never really a goal of mine, the opportunity to go just happened and I took advantage of it. My cousin who is an officer in the Marines got stationed there and invited my family to come visit. For the most part, Hawaii lived up to my mental image of it. What surprised me was that the water really is the same colors that appear in photos. Not all of Hawaii is a paradise though. There are some very poor parts of the island that look no better than what can be seen on the mainland.

When I was younger, I spent my summers at my grandparents house in northern Wisconsin. The house itself is situated near a lake as most houses are in that part of the state. The days were spent swimming in the afternoon and fishing at night. Then we would do it all over again the next day. Those days are long gone.

I spent part of the morning reading an article about Robert Redford in the New Yorker. Later in the afternoon, I switched to Vanity Fair. My horoscope in the back of this month's Vanity Fair had the following to say about me.

Perhaps you need to be reminded that you are not a rat trapped in a maze. The labyrinth you have been running around in is inside your head. Your plans change at the speed of light. With the ruler of your 3rd house going retro, you must be making forty decisions a minute, all of which you reject sixty seconds later. This is just a defense against facing the fact that the life you have been leading is coming to an end, and that something new has simply got to happen. What that something is, though, is still a maddening mystery. Calm down and let it unfold.

Well, I believe that I came to the very same conclusion all by myself, but its still funny to see it in a horoscope. My personal feeling is that those must be as much fun to write as alien abduction stories for tabloids.

My small library of reading material at work has grown over the past few months. There are five novels and at least four different magazines scattered throughout my desk. If I was really brave I could display them on my desk, but that might be over doing it.

By accident I stumbled upon a woman tanning in the park this afternoon. All that I saw when I pulled into the parking lot was an empty car. Nothing seemed out of place. It wasn't until I stepped out of my car and walked in front of it to cross the street that I saw her sprawled out on a towel. She didn't seem to notice me and I kept on moving to the picnic tables. I guess that I could have asked her if she was worried about tan lines, but I didn't.