What Florida Sunshine?

I never order soup in a restaurant because it's always cold when it arrives, and so I'm always disappointed. It's the same thing with beach vacations. This one I'm on now is playing out just as I had feared: rain, rain, rain. Back home in Maine it was snow, snow, snow, but at least we weren't paying for a hotel room on the water.

I know what you're thinking: I'm an ungrateful bitch who is forgetting the whole, "I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet" thing. That's all well and good, but it doesn't change the fact that I drove two hours to the airport in Boston, then flew in a crowded tube in a seat that could not recline because it was in front of the exit row, then rented a car and drove another hour to not have this particular pair of shoes, whereas the footless man suffers that condition daily and surely is used to it by now.

So, rain at the beach. What does one do after one has taken a hundred pictures of the clouds and sand and ocean through one's fifth-floor hotel room window? One can always engage in people-watching, with any luck an absorbing activity. Yesterday I hit the jackpot: An unsavory hit man was waiting for his kill right outside my window! He arrived at 7:30 in the morning and immediately exhibited suspicious behavior, in fact he could not have been more obvious, what with standing in the driving rain, chain-smoking and checking his watch every few minutes, feeding the parking meter next to his sleek red Corvette every hour. All the while I was busy in my room, drinking coffee, showering, making plans with friends on the phone, and peering down from my window every so often to see if he was still there. He was.

Finally we went down for breakfast and saw him up close, having a few beers at the lobby cafe while we ate our eggs over easy at ten in the morning. We finally left him sitting in the rain, drinking and smoking, checking the watch, feeding the meter. Come on--this guy was clearly up to no good! He was gone when we returned, but I fully expect to hear about him on the news--maybe even today--when they discover the body deep within the hotel's recesses.

On the plus side, the turquoise ocean outside my window is overwhelmingly fascinating and absorbing, even a little scary, especially in bad weather. The water moves constantly, each breaking wave bringing a changing masterpiece offering clear evidence of a higher power, unlike the shallow mud flats near my home in Maine that just sit there, posing for all those mundane paintings the local artists make.