Beach Vacation '09 Reportage

You go beach vacation with Cid, you get up every morning early up and go for a walk. Cid takes great pride in being up and mobile around 7 a.m. She likes to collect her electronics & go marching off up the coast toward whatever promontory she has set in her sights, up to wherever and back with the little GPS doodad I got her a couple solstices back cluing her in on her prowess as a marcher.
     Me, I’d rather take a nap, truth up.
     So while Cid is up and mobile, I’m still aslumber. By the time I finally get tired of fighting the intrusion of sunlight into my cognitive fluidity, Cid’s probably half way up to wherever and ready to come about for return. That’s when the cell phone bleeps and I thus get informed that I should meet here at some point in the morning activity.
     I usually get about halfway to halfway. I go along for a while & eventually come to rest on a dune or walkway or such. Off in the distance I can make her out, resolutely stomping along, usually barefoot. Me? I’d rather have shoes on. Beach stomping takes a toll on footleather.
     As things go, it usually works out pretty well.
     Now this year, like so many before that I have lost track, we ended up beach side one row back. To get to the beach we trudge our crap across the street and over the gravel of public access beach parking. Chairs, umbrellas, bags of sunscreen, stuff all around carried over the asphalt & gravel, over the dune, down to the tide line of the beach, where we all sit around and sometimes go out to fall in the surf.
     This year, I ain’t been but once to the sea, as in feet in the water, but only once.
     As if that were hinted, this year, among the things I didn’t remember to pack were my swimmin’ shorts. Been here three days and ain’t once had the need any. But having made remark of how I’d forgot, Glen (Cid’s brother’s wife’s brother) loans me a pair of his special.
     I thank him, go on with what I was doing and then take a nap.
     I must have needed the nap ‘cause I was out like a light – even with Cid openin’ the windows for more light – for something like two and a half hours at least.
     And if that ain’t a hint, I ain’t had the radio gear on real big time yet ‘cause one of the other things I didn’t pack was the telescoping fiberglass pole that usually serves as a support for the sky wires. Which then gives me a reason for not getting totally psyched for the early morning E-skip and tropo that allows signals from Puerto Rico to cross over my head on their way to Europe.
     At which point every nap becomes a sign of just what’s going on here.
     Nothin’.

See, for me, there are vacations and then there are vacations. One kind of vacation, the kind with which I am probably the most familiar owing to the serial nature of their happening, involve going somewhere and staying somewhere at a nominally great expense so as to do nothing but drink beer, cook food, eat with many relatives similarly travelled and then sit on the beach or sleep off the drinking the rest of the time.
     Which is exactly where I am today, three days in on this trip, taking naps out of sheer, well, boredom.
     I prefer not to dwell on that so much, that napping and doing nothing out of sheer boredom, ‘cause it makes me think of the things I could be doing, were I not a large sum of cash and many hours on the road away from things I could or would rather be doing.

Now the only way to get past that set up is to consider what I’m gonna do the rest of the summer while Cid is back at work and I am back at the ranch, with things to do.
     First, of course, is to finish printing the last pages of the next penny dreadful for the APA. And subsequently distributing the type set for that, with plans for the next edition in the works already in my head and on paper.
     Then there’s the fixing up of the garden/back door shed where the cats and their night visitors sleep. That will involve hanging insulations, putting in trusses and other lumber to make that happen, followed by laying in of some masonite deck plate material that I’ve had for 25-odd years just in case I needed it. Once that’s done I have to figure out how to make shelves &c for the cat nesting boxes, which are needed so the outside cats & friends will have nominally warm places to park their fur during the winter months.
     Not to mention the lawn mowing, the house cleaning, the office clearing out & other such things as I am wont to do when I have time on my hands and the beach ain’t out there calling me to take another nap.
     Not that I won’t nap when I take vacation at home.

If you sleep like I do – in fits and broken bits of tranquility – you’d understand.

So I’m halfway through a week at the beach, ain’t been to the water but once and even then barely, with a dinner reservation thingie coming up in a couple hours, all set to go but nowhere to go, other ‘n maybe to the USS North Carolina Museum. And I had a very nice nap, thank you very much.