So let me tell you what I've been thinking about during these recent gloomy days: For more than 30 years now, my wife and I have been making regular pilgrimages to the central Oregon Coast in search of the restorative powers of listening to crashing surf -- and nothing, absolutely nothing, that falls into the category of "has to be done today." For 15 of those years, we have rented the same house perched on the ocean's edge where the spray at high tide clouds the floor-to-ceiling windows offering a 180-degree panoramic view from the mouth of the Yachats River on the north to Cape Perpetua on the south.

Early on, our Oregon visits were fast-paced as we became familiar with eating establishments, craft shops and the eclectic individuals who have, for one reason or another, migrated to more or less permanent residency in an area where it never gets hot in the summer and never gets cold in the winter.

Our hours in Oregon drift by as we sleep, eat, read, beachcomb, nap, eat, read and sleep, pretty much in that order. The rented house is crammed with the most up-to-date audio and visual equipment available. (The owner is, among other things, an electronics-gadget columnist for the Oregonian in Portland.) But we seldom turn on the TV. For one reason, the entertainment center is so sophisticated that I guess it would take the better part of an extended vacation to figure out how to turn on the TV, even with the eight pages of typewritten instructions (single-spaced).

We read lots of books during our Oregon trips. Not great literature, by any means. I like murder mysteries (the gorier the better) or historical novels (long on plot, short on details). Last October I achieved a new personal record for an Oregon vacation: four books. And they were thick books with itsy-bitsy type.

Our Oregon trips tend to fall between April and October. The only winter vacation we've ever taken was a Christmas holiday in Florida which will never be repeated, because Christmas is, by all that's right and holy, supposed to be cold. Not that I'm old and set in my ways or anything like that.

Whenever we talk to friends or family about Oregon, the first thing most of them mention is how rainy it is or how cloudy it is or how depressing it is.

I guess there must be some tourist trap somewhere in Oregon that has perpetual thunderstorms, but we don't know where that is. We have declared ourselves the official sunmakers for the great and sovereign state of Oregon, because every time we go, the sun shines.

We haven't experienced an Oregon winter. Everyone we know, including residents of Oregon, says the winter storms are brutal and a big magnet for storm watchers.

But there's a difference between raging storms over the ocean that come and go and non-stop, around-the-clock unrelenting gloomy weather.

I put the weather we've been having in the latter category.

Gray days. Gray nights (I'm just guessing on that one). Dripping gloom so full of moisture it will turn your patio furniture into a pile of rust. And gloomy mud.

If this is what Oregon is like when we're not there, we won't be moving any time soon. On the other hand, if the sun promised for today doesn't stick around, what have we got to lose? A New Yorker cartoon this week: An optimist sees a glass half-full. A pessimist sees a glass half-empty. An optometrist sees half a glass of water.

I'm trying to see the silver lining in all these clouds.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.