Cloudy Sunset

It seems like it’s been an eternity, but it’s never been closer than it is today. What? Why summer vacation silly. Earlier this week I read a Slate article, written by Troy Patterson their very effete “Gentlemen Scholar” in residence about summering. He was down on some poor schmuck who only had a week of summer vacation and was just trying to make the most of his little bit of time off by embellishing it with the term summering. I too only have a week off, but for that week I intend to be summering to the max. I’ll be summering so much that I might even be simmering. I guess that makes me just as much a cretin as the other guy. That’s just too bad, buddy.

Now my darling child bride will be summering at the lake, at least according to the strictures on summer vacations that Mr. Patterson has laid out. She’ll spend five weeks on Superior and then meet me again for another week’s vacation in the Finger Lakes. Still not quite the Hamptons, but at least it is in the same state. From a Midwesterner’s perspective that’s close enough.

There is just one wee tiny little problem with this New York vacation, I haven’t yet broached this subject with my boss. My plan was to wait until my Michigan vacation was over, before I announced the New York one. We’re in crunch time at work this summer and the idea of putting up two weeks of vacation at once seemed a bridge too far. I then came up with this more bite sized approach, but now that its implementation nears, I’m not so sure of its efficacy. Be as that may, it is now a course committed.

To criticize someone for making more of what little they have seems like more of a crime than that of one overstating their status. Some of us are not blessed with work that is not constrained to the office, like writing. Some of us are earthbound to our office desks. Famously, at least within my rather limited blog circle I once poked the bear about this matter. I was vacationing in Yosemite at the time and was climbing up the Yosemite Falls Trail. Near our summit, a crew was working on the trail. I wise cracked, “You’ve got one heck of a commute.” To which one of them responded, “Yeah, but when I go on vacation, I can spend forty hours in a cube.” I had to answer  with, “Touché!” During the summering season, no one wants to be left home alone in the office, least of all me.