jimsjournal
A quiet Saturday -- 11/06/04


[In the first few days after the election I was naturally inclined to comment on the election results and on the various reactions I had observed... but I kept putting it off because I found it too unpleasant. Maybe I'll have something to say in another week or two, when things have settled down a bit.]



Friday was a migraine day. I woke up with a terrible sinus headache and none of my usual remedies helped (Vicks Sinex, aspirin, black coffee -- oh, okay, so I have the coffee every morning, but still sometimes it helps) and around seven a.m. I sent an e-mail saying I was taking a sick day and eventually (after more aspirin and nasal spray) I went back to bed and slept for a couple of hours. That helped some, but the headache didn't really go away until late afternoon, leaving me free of the headache, but feeling as if I had been punched in the face. Fortunately, there has been a lull in activity at work and I had actually eliminated my backlog, so taking Friday off will not mean that I'll be buried in work on Monday.

This morning -- after a leisurely breakfast, reading the newspaper, checking e-mail, etc. -- Nancy and I went shopping. We went to Home Depot to complete the order of a storm door for our front door and arrange for one of their sub-contractors to install it. (I had installed two storm doors on our former house and, believe me, I would far rather pay a professional to do it right than to waste a precious weekend day struggling with it myself.) Then we went up to Warwick because J.C. Penny's was having a big sale. Nancy wanted new curtains for our bedroom. She found ones she liked, they didn't have them in stock but could ship them from a warehouse to arrive later this week all at the sale price and no shipping charge. I wandered over to the towels because they were on sale, buy one, get a second for ninety-nine cents. Found some towels I liked (big and thick) for $12.99, so four towels came to under thirty bucks including tax. We were also on a lamp hunt. I needed a new lamp for my nightstand and Nancy thought she would replace her lamp so we would have matching lamps. Looked in Home Depot, didn't like any lamps they had. Penny's doesn't carry lamps. Went to a different mall, didn't see anything. Then, what the heck, there was a Wal-Mart, let's take a look. Found a pair of lamps we liked. They took 150 watt three way bulbs, good, a choice of brightness. Found shades. Found bulbs. In and out in about ten minutes. Cool.

On the way home we decided to detour to a beach... Picked East Matunuck State Beach (which is the one Nancy likes to visit with her sisters to visit when they are in town)...

The weather was very mild today, although a bit windy. The sun was shining and temperatures were well up into the fifties, maybe even sixty.

It was quite a bit cooler at the beach.

No... it was downright cold at the beach. The wind was whipping in from the ocean at a good steady twenty miles an hour, but there were frequent strong gusts that were more like forty or fifty miles an hour. As soon as we stepped out of the car Nancy put on her jacket and I put on my hooded sweatshirt and zipped it up. The surf was pounding in, waves crashing, foam washing up onto the sand. When we had left the house I had almost grabbed a camera, but I wasn't wearing anything with a good secure pocket for carrying it, so I left it on my desk. Now, at the beach, I wished that I had brought it along.

There were so many good picture opportunities. There were three wetsuit-clad wind-surfers zig-zagging along the shore. (We joked that one of them could be Sen. Kerry.) The waves were, as always, picturesque. Grass bending in the wind. Closed-up summer houses. Ah, well, the surfers may come and go, but the beach will be there another day.

We walked along the beach to the rock breakwater at the edge of the Harbor of Refuge, but once we got there, the wind was so strong (and cold) that we only stayed a few minutes. My ankle was feeling a little sore from the walk there and I was limping by the time we had retraced our steps -- the tide was near high, so we had a choice of struggling through loose sand or walking on the hard-packed but slanting sand near the water's edge.

And we are spending a quiet evening at home. Nancy is working on writing up some stuff for her National Board Certification and I'm doing laundry and surfing the web and writing this.




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