Fun in the Sun(day). And Vacations.

You wouldn't know it by looking at my parched skin, but the weather has actually been quite beautiful lately in the city. This weekend was no exception. The humidity has been creeping up every once in a while, but I don't have any problem with that. Oh, other than for the small fact that I can't sleep at night. I really can't wait for the temperature to increase another 20 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit, take your pick) so that I can lower the hours of sleep I get a night down to the 1-4 range from it's current 6-12 (hey, weekends included) range....

Sunday, however, Apollo the Sun God was with us here in the city. It was probably in the 75-80 F. degree range and not a lick of humidity present. In other words, like every day in California :o/ . I realize now that one trully appreciates one's weather when one's weather's only consistancy is that it's inconsistent (If I used too many possessive (pro)nouns and thoroughly confused you, raise your hand).

Sunday was another volunteer day for me, so I spent the day with a bunch of kids from the Regent Housing Center up in Harlem again. Last month we went to the Space and Natural History museum, but this time I got to enjoy some time in Central Park and on a Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan's West Side and Liberty Harbor (aka Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the world's largest clock, and even Hoboken, NJ! ;^). On such a clear and lovely day, my only expectation was that I would get a nice little sunburn and hopefully contract skin cancer. Of course, as my previous mobile-phone blog states, it just wasn't meant to be.

In any case, I enjoyed my time with the kids again. Since my previous buddy Jeffrey wasn't there this time, I had a 10 year old Dominican girl named Carla to look after me. She was pretty darn mellow, as were her sisters. Her 9 year-old sister Elaine apparently has some sort of physical handicaps that cause her to walk a little slower than the others and she broke out in rashes/hives when she was exposed to the Central Park grass. But her sisters were like a mother to her, helping her out all the time...while I slept. Joking! But they were very caring for their little sister and it was nice to see that....

On my way out of Harlem after the day's events, I stopped by a baseball field where some teenagers were playing some baseball and I joined their game. I had a stellar day in the batter's box, hitting 2-for-3 with a couple RBIs and a reached-base-on-error-by-the-arrogant-shortstop. Not bad, even if I was hitting against a 12 or 13 year old pitcher :) . My fielding was a little sub-par at left/center/right-fielder/2nd/3rd-baseman. I made about four throwing errors to the first baseman, dropped a pop-up in short right-field, and booted a few ground balls. I guess I have some work to do on the fielding part of my game...

Saturday I didn't do too much. I headed out to Central Park and read some of my current book, East of Eden. At night, I had a brew at the local German restaurant pub and saw Troy, the new movie starring Brad Pitt. It wasn't too bad, but it definetely wasn't up to the standards established for epic-war-stories by Gladiator!

On the vacation front, I have a reservation booked for a round-trip flight to Vienna with a week and a half layover in Spain for September. I'll be visiting Alex in Spain and Roland Vas (the CD importer...at my expense ;) in Slovakia, as well as Leif in Vienna if Austrian Airlines doesn't decide that he needs to fly a plane out of Vienna when I'm there. Not having spent much time in any of those locations, it should be a great trip. Note to all of you global hoppers: If you book your flight as an "open-jaw" flight, you can pull off a layover in one location for a few days/weeks (like I'm doing in Spain) and use only one round-trip flight's-worth of points. How tight is THAT!