Archive: July 2007

I always forget that, when I go camping for the weekend, I never emerge fully rested or glowing with serenity. Sleeping on the ground and going without modern conveniences (like a shower free of ginormous spiders!) tend to make me somewhat crusty around the eyes, groggy in the voice, and achy in the muscles.

But, oh, the quiet. Hearing nothing but crickets and what I think were cicadas as I drifted off to sleep was absolutely worth it. I don’t realize how full of e-mail dings, air conditioner vents, engine rumbles, and cell phone rings fill my aural sphere until they are unceremoniously cut away. The stillness wrapped around me and massaged away the creaky feelings that camping induces. Getting a good dose of hiking, boating, and eating under my belt was no hardship, either. Full days of activities make the simplest foods even more delicious, even when they already have a leg up by being cooked over a campfire. Is there anything better than toasty marshmallows for dessert? I don’t think so.

I may not be completely alert right now, but the clothes I wore home carried the scents of the forest and campfire smoke. Yes, that’s a good thing.

P.S. We’re all ready. The new guy is coming home tonight. The panic is officially setting in.

My PDA is so cute. White, slick, and nestled in its brown suede home, it shines benevolently at me during the work day, letting me know when there are meetings to attend or phone calls to be made. It reminds me when I need to bring a dessert to a party. It provides my grandmother’s address when I’m mailing a last-minute greeting card. It houses oh-so-helpful electronic memos that are great for those scattered trips to Wal-Mart or packing lists (certainly a far cry from my previous “system” of scattered sticky notes). I love my PDA. My PDA loves me.

Today, though, the darn thing was rather insistent. Call the UK at 9am! Meetings at 12, 1:30, and 2! A writing deadline at 2! Alert screens with the nagging, flashing bell graphic came up far too often and I stabbed them away with the stylus.

But now, all is at peace. I only have to tie up some loose ends because the spate of meetings has passed and I am left with the most beautiful words in PDA existence:

No more appointments today.

Hello, weekend.

I was invited to a bridal shower that’s taking place this weekend, but we have other plans, so I sent my apologies along with a recipe card (chicken with garlic and shallots) to be included in the recipe collection. The bride is a childhood friend of JG’s, and while I wouldn’t have been wholly at ease, I still would have gone to the shower to boost the young person ratio. It’s tough to be a bridesmaid where the majority of party attendees consists of mothers, grandmothers, great aunts, and the like, so I try to attend when I’m invited, even though showers are pretty low on my list of Things I Actively Enjoy.

Conveniently, the bride and her fiancé were staying at our house on their way up to Cape Cod, so I had the chance to actually give her a gift. I thought it might be rather awkward, however, because, um, my default bridal shower gift is lingerie. If there’s something on the registry that I feel strongly compelled to buy, like a digital meat thermometer, I’ll usually throw in a cute camisole set to go with it. Then, the bride gets function and fun, right? In this case, though, the bride wasn’t really my friend; I was invited more because JG wasn’t allowed. Do friends-in-law buy each other lingerie?

On the one hand, it is what I would have brought to the shower anyway. It’s fun to get lingerie as a gift, right? And isn’t it kind of weird to shop for it for oneself? Or is that just me?

On the other, paranoid hand – what the heck was I thinking? I didn’t know what size the bride was or what colors she liked or at what point she drew the line between sexy and trashy. How could I make a vicarious lingerie decisions for someone I have only known through catch-up conversations three times a year? How?!

So, I did what any flummoxed gift-giver would do. I called my mother-in-law for a sanity check. She had known the bride for at least fifteen years, which was roughly 14.75 years longer than I had, and I posed my uncertainty to her. “I think lingerie is a great gift!” she said, brightly. “Yes, that’s the size I would go with, too. Just include a gift receipt and it’ll be fine.”

Okay, then.

I made many, many laps around Victoria’s Secret. The salesgirls kept offering to help, but they declared me a hopeless case when I made my eighteenth turn around the underwear display. After much internal deliberation, I left with a sheer yellow babydoll with white satin trim and, for a more casual occasion, a pink camisole with three complementary bottoms. Oh, and a gift receipt.

When the time came to present that shiny pink gift bag, I was trembling. Was the babydoll too transparent? What if she didn’t like yellow? Or pink? Then we would have an awkward scene of her trying to pretend she liked everything while I did my best to burrow into the floor. I swallowed hard. At the pivotal moment, the bride lifted out the babydoll and exclaimed, “Ooh! I love lingerie! This is so pretty!” Well, how about that.

Perhaps this occasion was one of those times where JG was correct in his assessment and I did, indeed, think too much. The rest of the time, though, I’m pretty sure that I think about things with the exact amount of consideration that they deserve.

At the end of a mind-draining, energy-sapping week, a friend called on Friday night to see if JG and I would like to spend Saturday at Bethany Beach with her and her husband. Her grandfather had a house where we could drop our things, she said, and it was supposed to be gorgeous out.

Oh, my goodness, yes.

In the early morning, JG and I rolled up to our friends’ house, loaded up the car with beach chairs and backpacks, and drove for two hours down to the Delaware beaches. By 10am, we were set up on the sand. As promised, we had a clear sky, a gentle ocean, and a refreshing breeze. It seemed as though the universe was making amends for tough weeks all around by dealing out calm weather and great company. All four of us sank into our chairs with small sighs of contentment.

Somewhere between playing in the ocean (yes, I went in!), collectively finishing a NYT crossword puzzle, falling asleep on beach towels, reapplying sunscreen, eating sandwiches, and reading magazines, the day slipped away from us. Every time I thought to flip open my cell phone to check the clock, so much more time had passed than I had anticipated; it was the polar opposite of a workday. Six hours on the beach flew by and all too soon, we packed up for showers and dinner.

Oh, but dinner did not disappoint. We slid into a giant booth at Bethany Blues, where we ordered drinks and pounced on the cornbread basket like we hadn’t eaten in days. With jazz in the air, we had our fill – and probably more – of barbecue pork and chicken, crab cakes, macaroni and cheese, and calamari. I ate with uncharacteristic speed, as if the food would disappear if I didn’t eat it quickly enough, and after every bite, I exclaimed, “This is so good!” A full stomach was the best accompaniment to a settled mind.

We staved off the inevitable food coma by walking along the boardwalk, making stops at the Candy Kitchen and a shop where I bought a fish-shaped magnet. As I held hands with JG and scuffed my flip flops along the boards, it was clear to me that we could not have ordered up a better time. Although I was sad to see it end, the satisfaction of having a full, perfect day made it okay.

Saturday was meant to be captured on a recording, labeled, and saved to replay. I’ll do my best to let it carry me through this week.