Beach Day

Beach day is an idea that I came up with originally when some friends and I had scheduled a trip but one by one we all backed out becuase we were broke. But, since we'd already planned to spend the weekend together, I suggested we dedicate at least one day to pretending we were at the beach. I hosted, everyone brought food and Tessa even brought her "Endless Beach" DVD which as you might suspect, just plays scenes of ocean waves continually, like a never ending visual Enya. It was perfect.

Jess and I spend a lot of time at home, but not enough time really enjoying home, so we decided to do a beach day for two. Unplugged, offline and no work allowed.

The weather was freakishly cooperative, serving up our first official storm of the Fall/Winter with rain and wind gusts up to 50mph. After the last week or more of gorgeous mild sunny Fall days, it was quite a shock to the system--but a perfect day to stay in, put on your most comfortable jammies and watch movies by the fake fire, which is just what we did. The Minestra Root Vegetable soup we made on Saturday was a perfect compliment to the weather. We watched leaves blow down our street and saw a huge branch that had broken off and fallen into the driveway across the street but were fortunate not to lose power at any time during the day.

Jess has her own Netflix account now, so we had plenty of movies to choose from. We started with Hell On Wheels, a documentary about the Tour de France which follows the German Telekom (now T-Mobile) team in the 2004 race. We followed that up with lunch and a few Tony Hawk battles and then watched Superman Returns. The opening credits rolled and some expository text came rolling up about Krypton, the journey to earth etc etc. I said, "You probably know all this stuff already," and started to fast forward.

"No, I don't, what's the story?"

"What!? You've never seen Superman?" I knew that she was tragically sheltered from pop culture in her youth, but come on, it's Superman! Truth, justice, the American way! Well there was no help for it. But I'll have to rectify this gaping hole in her super hero education before winter is over.

The entire day was lazy, warm (did I mention the fake fire) and thoroughly enjoyable. We've decided to do it once a month.