I missed the Solstice this year.

As I know I've muttered about elsewhere, my time management skills have gone to shit these last few months. So while a more orderly person would have scheduled himself properly to allow himself time to enjoy the longest day of the year, yours trully has spent the extra sunlight glued to his computer working on designs for a Bright-Matrix client.

Now, I know, as my cousin Kenny pointed out last year, technically speaking, today's Solstice is not the actual longest day of the year. According to the website Ken told me about, we actually get a whole minute more sunlight tomorrow (and the next few days) than we did today. But that's as may be, but today is still Solstice, and the First Day of Summer, and it should be commemorated in ways better than me cursing out Macromedia's Fireworks for not rendering it's pixels the way I need it to.

On the bright side, today was absolutely perfect. Mid eighties, very little humidity. A gorgeous Summer day. I went out to lunch with some co-workers and playfully asked my supervisor if I could work the rest of the afternoon outside. And I was very happy to have gotten back into my regular walking route (I started up again yesterday, not having walked--thanks to my Albany trip--since the 9th of June.) There isn't as lovely a park as the ones up where I used to live; the land down here is dissapointingly flat; if I want real hills and valleys I'll have to drive into Pennsylvania and visit Valley Forge. So there couldn't have been any "back to nature" moment like I had last year. But even so, it would've been nice to grab my book and sit out on my patio, enjoying the fact that I could read until 8:30 without aid of electric light.

But no. I had to procrastinate yesterday, and as I recouped from my walk (which seems to be leaving me practically comatose for a solid hour after the fact, which leads me to question just how healthy this is; Lord knows I'm probably doing something wrong. How one can mess up something as simple as walking I am unsure--but that's jsut all the more reason to doubt whether I'm doing it right in the first place. But I digress....) I decided to spend the time web surfing rather than working, so it's not like I could have even afforded myself an appropriately timed break to enjoy the sunset.

But hey. Tomorrow's another (sixty-second-longer) day so I can always go out and read tomorrow. And according to Ken's site, there's only going to be about a sixteen minute drop in daylight between July 1 and July 30, so I still have plenty of daylight ahead.

Regardless: it's mid-year. This Sunday will be exactly six months (to the date and day that I've moved down to Maple Shade. I'd be less than honest if I said it's been a rip-roaring success, socially speaking, and that is a subject for another blog entry, or judicious use of Setec Astronomy while I sort through the logistics of building a social life from near scratch. But All in all . . . the job is good, the apartment is good, the area is nice . . . there are trully worse fates than the one I'm experiencing at the moment.

Ah well. Time to do a minor polish on the site designs and then I'll relax a bit more before calling it a night.