Saturday dawned clear-skied and brilliant blue, a welcome change after Friday night’s hail storm. For the second week in a row, I rose with the early birds, awakening at an hour when most people were still fast asleep. But there was a special reason to get moving with the sun — we were heading to the beach!

We’d heard fearsome tales of the Bay Bridge and its mythical traffic jams, so Rudi wanted to get an especially early jump on the trip. I am not, however, a morning person, so Rudi’s desired start time inched later and later until it was a more reasonable 7 a.m. when we walked out the door.

Suffice it to say, it was a beautiful day for spending at the shore. Bethany Beach, Delaware, is a cute town, reminiscent of some of the beach towns along Route 1 in Connecticut. It isn’t as built up as some of the other beaches in the area, such as Ocean City and Rehoboth, supposedly are, and its boardwalk offers only a small selection of vendors, so it tends to attract more families than singles. Having grown up at family beaches, I felt right at home with little kids scrambling around us.

By one, a little more than two hours of our visit had lapsed, and I was already thinking fondly of the day as one of the nicest days I’d spent at the beach this decade. Sarah, Rudi, and I were just reapplying sun screen when I happened to look up, glancing between bodies at the water off to my right.

“I think,” I announced, trying to keep my cool, “that I just saw either a dolphin or a shark.” (more…)

Congratulations are in order to my best and oldest friend, Karen, for bringing a dear baby into the world on Thursday afternoon.

I have not asked permission to post this snippet of a picture Michael sent me of his new son, but I hope they will forgive an aunty for being proud and wanting to share his sweetness:

Two weekends ago, I spent a warm Sunday afternoon lounging in Mitchell Park, which is a few blocks from the Burrow.

The sky was blue.

(more…)

I’m off by a day or two because of the long weekend. I’m not complaining, though.

Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. On Saturday, I spent time in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut. Rudi did the same, substituting New Hampshire for Rhode Island. With the exception of Maine, we covered all of New England. It was good to be home.

2. On 91 north of Brattleboro, the highway travels through and above your typical northeastern forestland. But Vermont’s air is so much cleaner than southern New England’s that you really notice the pine scent as it wafts through your windows. (And earlier in the morning, I could smell the sea at one point, even if I had a tough time actually finding the South Shore.)

3. If I can have a book in my possession, I’d much prefer to read rather than listen to it. (I’m not putting down those who listen to audiobooks, but my brain processes the two experiences in totally different ways, so I find it impossible to say that when I listen to a book that it’s reading.) That said, clearly one should not peruse a novel while driving. I had Plum Lucky on my iPod, so bounty hunters Stephanie and Diesel kept us company while we were stuck in late-night traffic on the Garden State. It seemed appropriate somehow, since the book is set in New Jersey.

I promise by tomorrow I’ll be awake enough to write a proper post. Maybe it’ll even include photos. I won’t make rash promises, though.

In the meantime, I direct you to visit this site. Purportedly graphs about baseball, I think there’s something that everyone will find interesting there, whether it’s that batters generally face northeast, that Washington baseball franchises have a .412 lifetime win percentage*, or that if you strung all the pitches thrown during the 2006 MLB season together, you could reach from St. Louis to Mumbai, 8,318.5 miles away.

We’re up in Connecticut for a long weekend (and for Rudi to ride across New England). I spent much of today napping in the car, so I am now much less tired and stressed than I was yesterday.

It’s Thursday, though, so we must conclude the day by reflecting on three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Susan, Rudi, and I spent Sunday night at the movie theater. But we preceded it with cupcakes from Baked & Wired (the best cupcake bakery in D.C., if you’re wondering). Mine was chocolate peanut butter and delicious.

2. A hot day demands cold iced tea. I prefer the powdered, sweetened variety that comes in a canister.

3. Sunday afternoon, I decided to head to Mitchell Park to lie in the sun and read. Ultimately, when I arrived, I opted to sit at a picnic table in the shade, instead, but I ended up being outside for hours with my book. A breeze ruffled the trees, bees buzzed from flower to flower, dogs and their owners romped in the field, and birds called overhead. And best of all, just after I arrived, two 20-something guys showed up. One had an upright bass, the other had a tenor sax. They riffed for several hours, filling the park with jubilant jazz.

Please pardon my lack of posts for the next day or so. I am a big bundle of stress right now and figure no one really needs me to unload it here.

But if you see my Connecticut set of keys, you will let me know, right?

Flush by Carl Hiaasen

From the jacket: “Noah’s dad has a little problem with anger control. He tried to stop the Coral Queen casino boat’s illegal dumping … by sinking the boat. But his bold protest fizzles: Within days, the casino is back in business, and Noah’s dad is behind bars and out of action. Now Noah is determined to succeed where his father failed. But even though pumping raw sewage into the waters of the Florida Keys is both gross and against the law, turns out it’s near impossible to catch the flusher — especially when he’s already bamboozled the prosecutors, the local press, and even the Coast Guard.”

My take: When I decided to sign up for Maggie’s Southern Reading Challenge 3, my first challenge was going to be meeting a review goal of the first book by today. So I thought I’d tuck a kids’ book into the list so I had time to pick it up at the library, read it, and get it reviewed. I’d read Hoot before, so I knew that I liked Hiaasen’s style, at least for his young adult books.

Like Hoot, Flush takes place in Florida and focuses on the story of a middle school boy who finds out about an impending environmental disaster and must decide what he’s going to do.

The book opens at the town jail, where Noah has stopped in to visit his dad on Father’s Day. Paine is a mild-mannered waterman who, as his family routinely points out, tends to get a little carried away when he sees a wrong that needs righting. In this instance, he has sunk a local casino boat, purportedly because its owner, Dusty Muleman, is pumping the boat’s toilets into the bay. Noah’s mom has tried to bail him out, but Paine refuses to let her. He’s happy to stay locked up, claiming his being in jail brings attention to the situation, but the kids overhear Donna on the phone talking divorce and start to worry their father may have gone too far this time.

In the days that follow, Noah and his younger sister, Abbey, see what they can do to learn more about the charges their father has lobbed at Muleman. They scout around the marina, dodging Muleman’s bullying son during the day and his thuggish security at night. At Paine’s suggestion, Noah consults an ex-mate from the Coral Queen, Lice Peeking, a soused bum living in a trailer with Muleman’s bosomy ex-girlfriend, Shelly, who both agree Muleman’s no good.

But when the kids nearly get grabbed, Lice disappears, Paine gives up his fight, and Shelly, Abbey, and Noah witness the effect the sewage has on the local wildlife, it’s time to up the ante. Can Noah and Abbey set up Muleman, dodge the scarred old man living in the woods (who seems to know an awful lot about them), and still be back home in bed before their folks get home?

Ultimately, this is a story about interconnectedness and vigilance. One thing touches another, which touches another. Noah’s family might get frustrated with one another, but, ultimately, they’re there for each other, looking out for one another, watching everyone’s backs. They are separate but a whole. And the environment is the same way. One person can — for good or for evil — affect the wildlife and the people who use the water. And even seemingly benign carelessness can lead to long-term problems. The environment is not something apart from us.

Hiaasen works a bit hard sometimes to drill these points in, sometimes creating a rather awkward back story to make it all work. But he has created some great characters — Noah, a real boy who’s inherited his father’s passion for protecting those who can’t speak up for themselves; Abbey, his analytical sister with a flair for drama; and no-nonsense Shelly, whose big heart is ultimately much more noticeable than the tattoo on her arm — who carry the story through in the end.

Pages: 263

A couple weeks ago, as you may recall, I was desperate to bake up some goodies involving the first two spring fruits — strawberries and rhubarb. Jenn suggested I try cupcakes first, which was just as well because Rachel of Coconut & Lime was marking her fifth blogiversary with a contest involving her recipes.

So I commenced, far later in the evening than was advisable, to make her Baby Loves Rhubarb Cupcakes: (more…)

For those of you with cable or dish service, your transition to the digital tv broadcast era has probably been no more of a headache than putting up with a stream of news stories, commercials, and banner ads warning of the switchover. Those of us who receive our television over the airwaves (and particularly the subset of that group living in cities or remote areas), however, have spent the last few months fretting. Would we lose stations altogether? Would we have to put up with the flickering in and out on the stations we did get? (Again, those of us living in urban areas found it particularly trying that trucks passing by and helicopters flying overhead seemed to knock out perfectly good stations.)

By the time Rudi and I got home last night, the transition was complete. We rescanned with interest and a bit of trepidation: what would we find?

Of the stations we received back in the good old analog days, about two-thirds come in still, with the added boon of substations. I imagine this will be particularly nice when trying to learn foreign languages, as MhZ now offers us five different stations that focus on international and diaspora programming. We also get NBC, Fox, myNetworkTV, ION, Univision, and the CW. And with most of these stations, it looks like the signal amplification they were allowed to implement yesterday has done the trick of traffic taking out our signal.

Unfortunately, we have not yet found a way to pull in CBS or ABC (who made the decision to leave behind the VHF bands in favor of UHF), or any of the three PBS stations we used to get.

I’m hopeful that Rudi and I will be able to find spots in the living room where the antenna pulls in those key missing stations. PBS will be a particular loss, since their online offerings are woeful compared to what they air on tv.

And, yes, if we don’t regain them, there are always videos, online offerings, and, even, turning the tv off.