As you stand in the middle of January and start chopping your calendar time into bite-size pieces palatable enough to fit your career, your family and yourself, remember the old adage, "first things first."
This means that the No. 1 priority is vacation time! Once you get this taken care of, all other items will fall neatly into place.
Perhaps you already have plans to travel. Returning from vacation '98, you may have promised yourself something really special for the end of the century. After all, 1999 years are a lot to carry into the big "double 00."
Congratulations if your tickets are in the mail and you've mentally packed your bags. The rest of us need to decide where in the world we want to go.
Travel offices are like blossoming gardens this time of year. All the newest brochures and tour booklets in riotous colors beg to be picked and taken with you. Every page beckons the undecided with tours not to be
missed. Unforgettable packages will fit themselves into your time limits if
only you say the word.
I myself am dreaming a faraway dream this year. I want to go to China. I want to see the beauty of the gorges of the Yangtze River before the monumental dam is finished and the river rises and slowly drowns another
natural splendor. Man wins again over nature. I shudder to think how nature
will have her revenge. I have seen enough hurricanes.
Anyway, if my plans don't happen to fit into my calendar, I'll put my name into a bottle and launch it out onto the waters to China. Maybe one of us will get there.
Editor's note: In 1994 after 25 years in the Caribbean, Jessie Bostwick O'Mara and her husband, Joe, retired to the Florida Gulf Coast from St. Thomas, V.I. She is a former fixture of the Admissions Office at
the University of the Virgin Islands and a proud UVI alumnae. About her penchant for travel she says, "I was a compulsive tourist from the moment I opened my first passport and saw all those empty pages waiting to be filled."