Surfing the Inner N8

A day off in the middle of a really crammed stretch of days can be so refreshing. Since my weekends have been (and will be for a while) pretty full, I took off yesterday. Didn’t even leave the house until nearly 6:00 p.m. It was great.

The day began perfectly: sleeping in. I didn’t roll out of bed until after 9:00. After brewing a hot and potent cup of coffee, I returned to bed with my full Longaberger mug and Bible. Taking a break from Daniel, I read and reflected on the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. There is more than enough in those few verses (Matthew 5:1-12) for a lifetime of reflection.

A chicken fajita with a glass of milk hit the spot while I read a very interesting Sports Illustrated profile of Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson III. I didn’t realize that he coaches Patrick Ewing’s son, just as his dad coached Patrick Ewing at Georgetown. How cool is that?!?

Lunch was followed by the movie The Benchwarmers. It was a bit crude even for my tastes, but totally hilarious. Unfortunately they felt obligated to make an actual story–complete with a moral–out of it. If they’d just left it with a bunch of funny scenes and left out the storyline, and not gone quite so over the top with the juvenile stuff, it would’ve been worth buying.

The Benchwarmers was followed with two episodes of The Bronx is Burning. Certainly not a classic in the world of cinematography, but as a baseball fan I found it really interesting.

Then I moved on to reading. I’ve always got a huge pile of books waiting for me, but I’ve discovered that one of life’s secret little joys is bucking the tyranny of the reading list, wandering aimlessly through the public library, finding something totally new to me, and letting it interrupt my reading plan. So after The Bronx is Burning I sat on the couch with a cold liter of cherry seltzer water and the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. Very different, very interesting. An amazing writer (though he can be annoyingly dogmatic about his secular humanism)! I’m not yet far enough into it to really offer any kind of review.

When Carolyn got home we went to Dough Roller in Ocean City for pizza and birch beer. Speaking of Dough Roller, it still seems weird that the one on the boardwalk burned down on Sunday. It’ll be really odd to see that little stretch of boardwalk with its shops that were destroyed by the nine-alarm fire three days ago.

After dinner we came home and finished watching a BBC production of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Her novels are so long that even watching the film versions can take several days!

Carolyn crashed before we even got off the couch from watching the movie, so I read a little more of Saturday. It felt a little strange to spend a Wednesday like it was a Saturday. But man, was it just what the doctor ordered!