Sunshine on My Shoulders

…make me peel and burn and turn a nice raw umber.  I do mean raw, as it does feel hot and toasty at the start of what eventually turns into a nice dark tan.  My problem is, it is never consciously induced, so I always get the weirdest tan lines that develop around the various articles of clothing I wear.

This year’s latest fashion burn is the no sleeve tank, which gives me a nice round brown neck and chest, with a very small white shoulder stripe and nice dark arms all the way up to the top of my shoulders.  My seven-bangled bracelets mar the nice tan of my right hand by constantly getting in the way of the tan there, and so my right wrist is always lighter, in clearly delineated bands, than my left wrist, which only has the odd white bangly shade of pale under my left ring finger, where my wedding band and engagement ring lives.

As usual, my rants and raves have less to do with the actual rant itself and more to do with all the various things going on in my life.  Part of the reason why I am turning such a nice dark color is because I walk Gilligan around the early part of the afternoon, when I take a break from my work.  It not only gives us a reason to get out and breathe the carbon monoxide from the cars driving by, it also gives us a chance to absorb all the ultra-violet vitamin D that the sun provides.  In the winter when I can’t get that much sun, I rely on milk to give me the vitamin D that I need, and I do my best to get by without much UV…but I digress.

Walking Gilligan has brought so much sunshine to my life that I am now several degrees darker than I normally get at this time of year.  I am so dark that I am almost as dark as Wayne, and that’s saying something, considering his ancient Moorish ancestry and his Mediterranean background.  Of course, Wayne will tell you he’s really an American with little ties to the Italians other than a genetic one, but that’s just him talking.  The various shades of olives and the plethora of odd-shaped pasta living in our pantry speak volumes about his strong ties to his Italian ancestors.  I try to compete, by taking up as much pantry space as possible with my huge 50 pound bag of jasmine rice and my fat-ass ten-cup deluxe rice cooker with the ‘keep-warm’ button so that we always have hot-ready-to-eat rice every moment of every day of the blessed year.  The Asian woman is In Da House!

Again, I digress.  Blame it on the fact that it is 6 AM and I cannot sleep due a recent acquisition of a summer cold (what an oxymoronic word) and my usual asthmatic conditions, which I treat by various methods of medications and inhalers, some of which put me to sleep and others, which keeps me wired, alert and shaking.  The result is a strange, twisted, early-morning blog with no reason and no rhyme, other than the fact that it starts with ‘Sunshine on my Shoulders, and ends with Sunshine on my Shoulders’.