I spent most of today, the first day of summer, inside looking at the blue sky through my office window. I was up until 2 AM last night working on a personal programming project, savenotes.com, after spending the entire day programming at work (I love programming!). I was really feeling the sleep loss on my 8 AM morning ride into Boston. Half way there, while sitting in traffic, I realized the sunglasses I was wearing were probably tricking my body into thinking it was still time to sleep. I felt much better after a few minutes without wearing them. The radio mentioned how today's weather should feel like Hawaii weather: little to no humidity, blue skies, 80 degrees. Great I thought, and I was headed into work to spend the entire day inside.
Around 2 PM, I was surprised when I realized I didn't seem to mind being inside all day programming. I figured it must be because I have a huge window to look through all day. My office in Lowell has no windows at all and on a nice day I get very agitated after working only a few hours. I headed home a little early today (6:30 PM), hoping to catch enough sunlight to go mountain biking. The sun was already setting by the time I arrived at the trail head, but I still managed to get in 25 minutes of sweating.
I've been trying to decide whether or not to take a trip to Florida to watch the space shuttle launch, scheduled for July 1st. I know I just got through writing a few posts about saving money, but this is a trip I've been saving up for. I was going to go for three days, Friday - Sunday, so I could do some traveling at the same time and visit the Florida Everglades for some photography. I needed to have a backup plan, because space shuttle launches are notorious for being rescheduled. You may have read that watching a space shuttle launch is one of the things on my "to do before I die" list. NASA's plan is to phase out all space shuttle launches, replacing them with a newer, less expensive spacecraft by 2010. That only gives me another 3 1/2 years to watch a launch. I decided not to go this time mainly because of how much stuff I have going on right now, with all the tenants moving out, etc. Besides, right now there are lots of thunderstorms in Florida, so it probably isn't such a good time for photography in the everglades.