Three-Day Weekends

Here’s my other painting–it’s one of the pilings for the Bolivar Point ferry on Galveston Island. I liked how all the seagulls (and one pelican) made themselves at home. I want to paint pelicans all flying in a row like they do sometime…they are so cool. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog rambling.

We’re not going anywhere for Memorial Day. Obligations here in town, and all that. But it got me to thinking about three-day weekends.

Three-day weekends aren’t an exceptionally big deal at my house. Well, not for me, because I work at home and can set up my own schedule how I want it. But we have three-day weekends all summer long, because the fella works at a community college.

A whole bunch of community colleges across the state–and maybe nationwide, for all I know–go to a four-day week in the summer time. They still offer a full slate of summer school classes, but years ago–we’re talking fifteen to twenty years ago–they realized that an awful lot of their students skipped class on Friday. And Texas summers require some serious air conditioning, which requires some serious electricity, which costs some serious bucks. So they started shutting the campus down on Fridays and getting the 40-hour week into four 10-hour days.

The local college has gone to summer hours. Which means that we can have a 3-day weekend to go visit the grandboys Saturday week and not have to deal with Memorial Day traffic.

When we used to live on Lake Whitney (north of Waco), if we took the boat out on the lake on a holiday weekend, we didn’t go out until at least five o’clock. Partly because the sun is lower then and less likely to turn me and our pale children into lobsters. Partly because the central Texas wind tends to die down beginning at about 5:00. But mostly because all the nuts who came down from the big city (Dallas/Fort Worth, mostly) to party on the water had burnt themselves to a crisp by 5:00 p.m. and were coming off the water.

Of course, some summer holidays we went out on the lake at 8:00 a.m.–the wind usually hadn’t picked up yet that early, and the idiots weren’t out of bed yet. This is Texas, remember. When it’s 99 F (37.2 C) in the afternoon, it doesn’t get much cooler than 80 F (26.6 C) by 6 a.m., and the lakes are all quite, quite warm. I got spoiled. I still don’t like to go in the water if it’s less than 90 F (32 C) outside, and the water had better be warm!

Anyway, while we’re going nowhere and doing nothing–except maybe going to see Pirates of the Caribbean III, but not at the drive-in theater in town because of all the bugs I can’t get off the windshield, and I hate looking through bugs–I hope that y’all have a great holiday weekend–those of you who are having a holiday. What are you doing for the weekend? I need to clean all the books off the floor…