Suzy Says

I see the ever-popular Friday Five is all about vacations this week. It’s amazing that I ever even go on vacation when it looks like this, right here, right now, right outside my window. You gotta love it that it’s been 70 degrees and sunny for the last week of February. This is why we pay the big bucks to live here.

I have travelled a fair bit, but there are still places I’d like to visit. Some are impossible, though. I’d love to visit Egypt 50-100 years ago, before the tourist traffic got so heavy that it started ruining the very things that attracted the hordes in the first place. Hawaii, 50-75 years ago, ditto. I’d like a decent hotel, but not high rises on the beach. Unless they get going on that Star Trek instant travel thing (and why haven’t they?), I’m not going to Thailand or Australia, even though I want to. I can’t face 14+ hours in a plane for any reason whatsoever, even first class. Too boring, too long. And since time travel, too, is still impossible (what have scientists been doing all these years, anyway?!), my Number One vacation wish remains impossible: to spend a week in Bar Harbor, Maine (where we spent the summers when I was a kid), as a 9 or 10 year old. But it would have to be 30 years ago, when I really was that age, and life was fearless and good and the summers were endless.

Within the realm of the possible: Greece; Morocco; Tanzania (where I would go on safari with an old friend who lived with us for a few years as a student before returning to his native Tanzania); Easter Island; Tahiti & Bora Bora.

So it’s Friday, and sunny, and I’m counting the hours until I can get out of my office building and start living my real life. I’m meeting John after work today and we are shopping for a CD burner. We have our iMac back and our joy knows no bounds. In order to show it how happy we are that it’s home, we are going to buy it a lovely new accessory, which has the added bonus of being fun for us, too. I might even get the new Joey Ramone CD and copy it for my bro and sis, so I can bring it up when I visit them in a couple of weeks. Joey’s gone, but the music lives on, and you haven’t really lived until you hear his version of “Wonderful World.”

To recap: sunny, beautiful Friday, shopping on the agenda, and the iMac is back. Yes, I may have poisoned John slightly with last night’s leftovers, and it is just when everything is going great that Fate usually gives me one of her nastier surprises. But I am giving way to a cautious, uncharacteristic optimism anyway. Stay tuned.