Touching down
We’ve been back from Hawaii for two weeks now. It was seventy degrees and humid the morning we landed. Chicago has seen a few cold days since then, but nothing like before we left. The moisture has moved in. If it’s at all warm, expect a thunderstorm around 5:30 p.m. If you can step outside in shorts, you might as well wear a rain jacket.
I liked Hawaii more than I expected. We consider it our first successful vacation. Iceland and Norway were intriguing but stressful and expensive. We picked the right itinerary for this trip: three days in the tourist strip of Honolulu, three days camping on Kauai, and three days at the Grand Hyatt resort. At the end of each part of the trip, we were happy to move on. Camping also alleviated my guilt for staying at a resort. It may have helped us score a sweet room, too. Caroline told the guy at the desk that we had spent one night at Haena and two nights on Polihale. He chatted us up and then gave us a top-floor, ocean-view room. We paid for the garden view.
I didn’t touch a computer or turn on my cell phone for ten days. I didn’t read a newspaper either (though I did cheat on the way home and read the Pennsylvania primary results on a paper lying upside down). I felt liberated. I used to think that procrastination hurt in two ways: you lost the time spent reading useless stuff on the web and you split your productive time in two. But that’s not the whole story. You think about whatever you read. So if you kill time reading about politics, you’re going to spend some of your time away from the computer thinking about politics. The secret to not wasting time thinking about useless stuff is to read less useless stuff.