Yesterday was the longest day of  the year in the northern hemisphere. It was sunny, so the daylight extended truly until the end of the day, and it was beautiful. As well, today, Sunday morning, the sun was up much earlier than I was, which woke the birds, which in turn woke me.

Today my jazz band is going to play at a garden party. For supper my family will have a barbecue, and this evening we will enjoy the long summer day until the sun sets nice and late, because it truly is now the start of summer.

This got me started on thinking of my summer plans. The weather here on the west coast has been quite dismal, so it’s been hard to think of summer, but summer is finally here. I plan to spend a lot of the summer in my back yard.  For part of that I plan to watch my tomatoes grow, but I will also be writing, sitting in the middle of the grass with my netbook.

I can remember the days before everyone had a laptop or netbook, and the only truly useable computer was a desktop, which meant to use a computer you were trapped in the house.  Today my phone does more than my first computer. A few years ago I was at a museum where they had a few older computers on display, and to my shock one of them was the same as the computer system that I used at an old job until only a couple of years before I saw it in the museum.

I don’t know what that had to do with the first day of summer, maybe this is the day to look ahead, and in order to appreciate what is ahead, we need to remember what was behind.

Enjoy the summer!