How do you retire at 35 if you haven’t won the lottery, hit it big in stocks or invented something incredibly cool that everyone in the world wants, like an iPhone or spray cheese in a can? If you have some ideas, please let me know. Drop me a line, as long as it doesn’t involve knocking people off or me dancing. I have decided it’s time for me to retire. It’s not that I don’t like working. It’s just that I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to vacation . . . forever. I want to wake up, go to the gym, drink lattes and read the newspaper after a casual stroll. I want to live in a hotel room where I can get cookie crumbs and smeared chocolate all over the sheets. I want to swim in big resort pools with Mayan pyramids and water slides until the chlorine bleaches my black hair the color of snow. I want an endless supply of towels that I can throw wet on the floor. I want to sip rum drinks. I want to become one with my flip-flops. I want permanent stubble on my face. I want to eat greasy food and stay up late with my kid goofing off until we both pass out in bed, or my wife puts us in timeout. I want that lifestyle!
A New Kind of Vacation: Call it ‘Toddler-style’
Boy, I remember the days when vacations were hard-chargin’ affairs and adventures to far off lands. We Thompsons would do ’em up right. There were cosmopolitan ventures to New York, and laid back sojourns to hammocks in the Keys. I remember times sitting on the dusty floors of Preservation Hall in New Orleans with a newly-bought flask whetting my whistle. We journeyed to Ireland to converse with the sheep, and even my trips to Cuba as a journalist took on tinges of vacation when the music started to drift through the Caribbean heat at night and the rum began to flow. I remember them just like they were yesterday, even though they’re a long time gone now. I think of this because the Thompson family will head out on a new adventure soon — our latest vacation. And this time we’re going somewhere very exotic and out-of-the-way … Orlando! Yippee. What a different world it is with a 2 -year-old. A few years back, if I was told I was going on a trip like this, I would have said, “No thanks, I’ll go to work instead.” I was a little bit of a vacation snob. But that said, the funny thing is, I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m excited, even thrilled. Part of me is a bit confused. We’re doing everything I used to dread. We’re staying in a Disney resort where my pillow will probably whisper in my ear, “Buy more Mickey Mouse toys.” We’re spending a day […]
Here Come the Polls
OK, I have officially had it. I am through, absolutely through. Here we are, something like four months out from the next presidential election and I just can’t take it any more. It’s not the candidates that have me going coo-coo. That whole song and dance is at least entertaining. What I’m talking about are the polls — the endless, non-stop, daily, earth-shuttering, hurry-up-and-read-it-‘cus-a-new-one’s-coming-in-five-minutes polls. They’re everywhere. You take a shower — there’s a poll in there. You try to eat your breakfast cereal — there’s a poll in there. Anywhere you look, there’s a new poll. Look, I understand wanting to take the pulse of the nation, but aren’t we going a little overboard here? This isn’t taking the pulse — this is a 24-hour MRI. We don’t need this much information. Take a few polls every couple of months and be done with it. I think we can afford a little suspense in our lives. Just a little. But if regular polls aren’t bad enough, I’m noticing a new trend: stupid polls. At least with regular polls, there’s relevant information that doesn’t knock the collective IQ of the nation down a notch or two. They basically just ask potential voters which candidate will get their hanging chad, and questions like that.
Time to Tackle the Wild Yard
Boy, add a little water to a Florida yard and in no time you have what looks like an Amazonian rain forest. The kind of place that you fear to venture to far out as the weeds and the critters might just carry you away. Mostly the weeds. My yard is in full bloom, and most of it is quite pretty. The firecracker plants in the front are little red refueling stations for two neighborhood hummingbirds, and the butterfly bushes are attracting their fair share of butterflies. I have pineapples on the pineapple plants, lemons on the lemon tree and the herbs in my daughter’s backyard garden (planted in an old timey, four-footed bathtub) smelling herby. Much of it is paradise, but the rest was turning to jungle. A natural yard is both beautiful and bedeviling, especially when it rains. Prolonged droughts can leave all-but the hardiest plants wilted and wounded. Ours are very hardy, and that just makes them more jumpy when the rains come. Steady and frequent rains make little plants, and other bits of green, stretch their spindly legs and venture out like bears after a long winter slumber. They start out slow, just testing the land, before rip-roaring out of the gate and swallowing up all in sight.
A Weekend Away From the ‘Baby’
As my wife and I strolled the cozy little streets of downtown Fernandina Beach, there was a moment when I think we both turned to each other and blurted out, “Where’s the baby?!?” That’s normally a running joke with us. If we go out to lunch sans the 2-1/2-year-old, someone will inevitably stop to ask where the kid is. “Oh my gosh,” one of us will say, hands clasped to face, “where’d she go!?!” or “I told you not to give her the car keys?” Sometimes people laugh; sometimes people call 911. It’s a mixed bag of reactions. But this time it didn’t feel like a joke. It really felt like we’d lost her — like we didn’t know where she was. “Um, didn’t you have her?” Here we were, a whopping 50-plus miles from St. Augustine, spending our first night EVER away from her. We felt naked, and it was kind of unnerving. A part of us — an important part — was missing. It felt weird, kind of awkward and almost like a guilty pleasure. Were we guilty of something?
Laying Down Floors in a Tampa ‘Furnace’
It seemed like a winning proposition: Head down with my brother to my mother’s house in Tampa and lay more than 700-square-feet of hardwood floors in her upstairs. She was paying us a substantial fee and promised to order us carry-out food until our intestines resembled manatees. Yet, somehow it sounded too good to be true. Too simple. Too easy. Too lacking in major complications the kind that are either life-threatening or get you sent to a special hospital where you try to work out why you’ve suddenly taken up eating wallpaper. Two little details had seemed to escape us (or maybe we had blocked them out): 1) the only way upstairs was a narrow spiral staircase; 2) the upstairs, like the downstairs, was un-air conditioned. And because heat rises, the second floor sucks up heat like a vacuum, collecting it in scalding corners that every so once in a while erupt in jets of scorching flames. As my brother and I stood there surveying the scene that first morning — the temperature already hovering around the boiling point of iron — one of his shoes caught fire. We watched as the sweat emerged on our skin and then instantly evaporated, forming thunderstorms in the appropriately named “sun room.”
Don’t You Dare Take Away Our Flip-Flops
Did anyone read about a new assault on Florida’s official state footwear — the flip-flop? That’s right. You heard me, the flip-flop. It stems from an American College of Sports Medicine study, which found that the quiet, unassuming flip-flop can actually lead to lower leg pain and a change in stride if worn too often. The college was careful how they worded their press release, and I appreciate that. No condemnation of the footwear, or calling for its outright ban. No, they understand the hornet’s nest they would have walked into. The picketing, the angry phone calls and maybe even riots. You can take away our guns, our voting rights and maybe even processed cheese snacks, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to take away our flip-flops. Not here. Not in Florida. You’ll have to pry them from our cold, dead hands.
Someone Please Explain the Endlessly Rechargeable Toddler
Have there been many major scientific studies looking at why children, and especially toddlers, have so much energy when they consume so little food? Where does it come from? Do they eat batteries? There has to be a good explanation. And I know this isn’t a new question. It’s been debated for centuries, maybe longer. What drives them? Where do they draw the incredible flow of juice that lets them run about the house until they conk into a wall and knock themselves out? There are plenty of ways to burn off that energy. One friend mentioned she’s taken up running her child in the backyard in the evening. I picture a little dog track, but instead of a plastic rabbit chase-toy, a dangling cookie or a bag of sugar. I remember a night on the way home that my wife turned to me and said she was going to take our two-and-a-half-year-old outside and let her run wild in the sprinkler until she tired or completely pruned up.
Computer Games and Virtual Fitness? What a Future
I saw this commercial on TV the other night, and nearly gave myself whiplash shaking my head in disbelief. In fact, I had to go online to check it out, just to convince myself I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing up. And it turns out it was real. It’s called the Wii Fit, a new product from Nintendo that is more or less a video game combined with a fitness routine. It looks a white pad — a super-fancy bathroom scale — that can read your movements and translate them onto the TV screen where you see yourself doing anything from yoga and snowboarding to strength training and, I don’t know, strutting around with your virtual muscles. I assume you can say things to virtual exercise babes like, “Hey, pretty mama, want see my serratus magnus?” (I have no idea what muscle that is, but if I had a virtual self with virtual exercise babes, I would definitely say it.) The Wii Fit essentially brings the world of video games together with exercise, which is kind of scary considering that video games have more or less killed exercise for so many kids. Now, let me stop for a minute: Some of it is kind of cool. The technology is pretty far out — this little device, with the help of your Nintendo, can help improve your posture while you exercise or keep track of your progress. It knows what you’re doing, and can help you do it better. That’s amazing, […]
What’s in a Signature? Electrocution or a lot of Neurosis
I don’t know why it caught my eye, or captured my attention. Maybe because it gave insight into the psyches of our three presidential candidates. Or maybe because my own signature is so horrid and erratic — comparable to what an electrocuted chicken might scratch out if given a pen. It was a news story I saw online that analyzed the signatures of McCain, Obama and Clinton in an attempt to mine a wealth of new information about the candidates, especially after the Magic 8-Ball revealed so little. I read the piece, fascinated. It told about how Clinton’s signature was written as if she were dodging sniper fire, how McCain’s when decoded said, “Age is 95 percent mental, and 5 percent how high you wear your pants,” and Obama’s stressed his main campaign theme by changing styles from one letter to the next.