Schedule For The Day*
(Thursday, July 2, 2009)
7:00 AM: Up, awake, coffee
8:00 AM: Pack for the beach
9:00 AM: Beach!
11:00 AM: Pizza and french fry time
12:00 PM: Snowcones! **
1:00 PM: Back to the beach house for naps (Owen) and "quiet time" (Mia)
2:00 PM: Funland!
5:00 PM: Beach house/changing/head to dinner
6:00 PM: Dinner
7:00 PM: Boardwalk for an after-dinner treat
8:00 PM: Bed for the kids
11:00 PM: Bed for the parents
I could get used to this. But sadly, it won't last much longer.
* And by day, I mean everyday.
** My goal for this beach trip is one or more snowcones every day. So far, so good.
Wish You Were Here
(Monday, June 29, 2009)
Dear Internet,
Wish you were here. No, really. It would be fun. I mean, the restaurants would all be really crowded and it would be a bitch to get a good spot at the beach. But it would still be fun. Anyhoo, you're not. So I'm just dropping you a line to let you know that the Cactus-Fish clan is here, at the beach, living it up. We're making sandcastles, walking the boardwalk, eating way too many French fries and snowcones and riding all kinds of rides.
Be jealous, Internet. It's pretty awesome.
Chris
The Weeklies #91
(Friday, June 26, 2009)
The Weekly Rallying Cry. Neda.
The Weekly Stupid Product, Or At Least I Think It Is But I Don't Have Boobs So Who Knows. KUSH Support. Yes, finally - an in-cleavage breast support system.
The Weekly Time Waster. Little Wheel.
The Weekly Read. Lisa Lutz strikes again with Curse of the Spellmans, her second novel overall and the second in the Spellman series. Lutz is just plain awesome. And so are the Spellmans, the family of private investigators who populate her novels. They're fun, quirky, zany, silly, and incredibly well-written. What's odd is that they're funny but they also have a great deal of heat and at their core there's a really good, serious mystery. While their styles are different, the most logical person to compare Lutz to is Marshall Karp.
The Weekly Celebrity Death Trifecta. Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett.
The Weekly Schadenfreude. It's honestly a toss-up between Jon and Kate and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. Dumbasses, all three of them.
The Weekly Terrible Customer Service. A homeowner in the DC area was more than a little frustrated with Verizon. He followed the Verizon tech to his van, blocked his attempt to leave then finally relented. Until the Verizon guy put his van in gear. The homeowner reached into the van's open window, grabbed the steering wheel, then fell. He later died. Can you haunt me now?
The Weekly Hypothetical. If you had to come up with a last-minute hypothetical question on your day off when you slept late and can't think of anything, what would it be?
Thumbs of Green
(Thursday, June 25, 2009)
When I was a kid, I found this preoccupation with digging, planting and pruning tremendously boring. It involved neither music nor getting in trouble with my friends so I pretty much had zero patience for it. But for some reason, I never minded helping out with the hard labor. Every year, my dad would have a truckload of topsoil and a truckload of mulch delivered, two mountains on our otherwise flat driveway. For a weekend, armed with wheelbarrows, rakes and shovels, we'd chip away at those mountains, moving, dumping and raking everything into the appropriate places. Like I said, I never minded. Maybe it was because it gave me a chance to work on my tan. For the ladies. But I never saw the appeal of the actual gardening part.
Beth and I bought our house from its original owners. Owners who happened to found and chair the neighborhood gardening club. That sounds about as exciting to me as a club devoted to knitting tea cozies or memorializing the middle names of former U.S. presidents in needlepoint. But we came out ahead in that deal because we inherited a beautifully landscaped yard. Though it came with some pressure. I'm pretty sure the neighbors, for the last two years, have been waiting for us to drop the ball, eying our yard, waiting for us to fuck up, bungle everything and allow it to grow wild and be inhabited by wild monkeys or just up and die.
I'm proud of us. We've done neither.
Springtime last year - the weed season - Owen was pretty brand-spankin' new. Our yard suffered. This year, however, we've made a full-court press in order to bring it back to its former glory. It's sexy work. At the end of every weekend, we find ourselves in the heat, wearing gloves and long sleeves, sweating up a storm, dripping sweat and blood, comparing the rashes and bites we've managed to get as if we dry-humped weeds and vines to which we're highly allergic. But it's worth it.
Know what's strange about all this? I finally get what my dad and grandparents appreciated about this. I can pop in some head phones, turn on my iPod and dig around in the yard and make stuff grow. Maybe I'm just getting old but there's something nice about gardening.
(Shit. Typing that last sentence made me feel about 80 years old. After I get done here, I'm going to go surf the internet to find the best price on a Rascal scooter than I think I'll head to the local buffet and have dinner around 4:00 this afternoon. If any of you want to join me, please feel free. But fair warning. I can't miss my Lawrence Welk rerun a 7:00 and I've got to hit the sack at 8:00, especially because I'll be up every half hour peeing.)
What things did you not appreciate when you were younger that you totally get now?
