Excellent Vacation

I'm back from the outer banks. What a great time. Gorgeous beach. Fabulous beachfront house. Perfect weather. Wonderful girlfriend.

I took a break from work, of course, but also a break from news, from e-mail, from blogging, from Internet surfing, from caffeine, from care, worry, and distraction. Who needs them? At work I check the headlines every hour, and my e-mail multiple times per hour, and for what? It's an obsession I would be embarrassed to admit to if it weren't so common (check out David Cole's recent piece in the WaPo). We should all relax a bit and work as though we were on vacation and just didn't have instant Internet access at all time.

Oh, I'm sure I'll be back into keeping up with every twist and turn of the news soon enough, but it was nice to be free of them for a week.

Mostly I sat on the beach and read. I read so much for work that it's difficult to read for pleasure during the term, so vacation is a time to read voraciously. I can recommend Wizard of the Crow, the latest from exiled Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. For an author whose best known work is called Petals of Blood, it's quite a departure -- much more humorous than upsetting. It takes a while to get going, but I was quite absorbed by about halfway. I also read Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, which I found in my library and realied I'd never read. Obviously not literature, but not bad for its genre. Certainly beats Grisham's stuff any day.

Also went swimming and hit a few golf balls. But mostly it was beach, beach, beach.

And I am embarrassed to admit this, but I took pleasure in noting that, even though the weather really couldn't have been more perfect all week -- absolutely cloudless skies and temperatures in the low to mid 80s -- it clouded over considerably on the day I left, and heavy rain is forecast for today and tomorrow because of tropical storm Barry. Why does that sort of thing make one happy?