Day 3 (Monday, July 28)

(2:50PM)

What does a Ben do in a normal day? The first order of the day is to try and figure out the weird dreams I have during the night. The other evening I had a dream where Tamara and I were sitting on a couch watching TV, resting on each other, and then I leaned up over her and kissed her. She was surprised at first, and objected, but soon enough I was smooth talking her into a make out session.

I’ve got no clue what that one means.

There is also some bike riding that is done. I figure that since I don’t go to the beach (more on that a little later) I might as well get some exercise and sun somewhere, so whenever someone says they want to go out on a bike trip I volunteer to tag along. Yesterday Tim needed some new inner tubes for the tires in Susan’s bike so we went to the bike shop in Cape May to get them. Cape May is a little while away though from where we are, which would have been fine except that Tim was keeping a nice brisk pace of like 30MPH or something crazy like that, and although I was doing all right keeping up on the trip in, my ass was dragging on the ride back. The muscles on the tops of my thighs just couldn’t push it any further.

Today my cousins, Tim, and I went to the local general store to get some ice cream, which, with Matthew leading the way, was a much more pleasant trip. Except that when we got there I saw the Snickers brand name in the ice cream box, asked for it, but it wasn’t Snickers ice cream that was in there, but a plain old frozen Snickers bar. That was fun to try to eat. My teeth still hurt.

What else do I do? Well, I do a lot of reading. I also check to see if there is anything good on the TV from time to time, but I’ve had little luck with that since the cable service we have here has like, less than 20 channels. What’s the point in having cable if you are going to have that little variety? Might as well just have an antenna. We do get Comedy Central though, so I watched the stand up comedy marathon yesterday because I love it ever so much.

I’m at the beach though, you say, why not go to the beach? Well, there are three reasons for that:

A) I hate the hot sun.
B) I hate sand.
C) I hate saltwater.

If you take away those three things, what is there really for a man at the beach? I know what you are thinking: What about the bikini babes? At least you can oogle in your misery. Well, where we are there aren’t really any hot chicks to speak of. More of the middle age mom variety visits these beaches. And that just ain’t pretty. Even the few hot ones are married or way under age, and so there is no possibility of getting any, so why even bother?

Why hate the sun? I burn easy, and find no pleasure frying myself up.

Why the sand? It’s so damn gritty and gets everywhere. That, and it tends to be even hotter than the sun above you. Who wants that?

And the saltwater? Have you ever taken in a mouthful of saltwater before? Yuck. Plus then there is all of the dead sea-life floating around you. Yeah, that’s fun.

So I hang out around the house mostly, and no one seems to mind much. There is kind of a rule around here of “It’s my vacation too” so no one has to do anything they don’t want to. Otherwise there would be way too much fighting around here.

I night I usually watch my cousins do cruel and odd things to their Beanie Babies, like slide them down the banister or have them bungie jump to their certain death. At least they aren’t playing hangman though. There is always that.

And dinner is usually around 8, 9 o’clock at night, and consists of different fresh seafood every night. Last night we had some great Tuna steaks. A lot of people who say they don’t like seafood are probably wrong about that, because they just haven’t had it prepared right. Fish from the store is one thing (I generally won’t eat that) but fresh seafood is another thing. It tastes so much better. So don’t knock it until you try it (prepared right).

We get our seafood every morning from the Lobster House, which is pretty much the first big building you see as you cross the bridge over the marina and enter Cape May proper. It’s a huge building with no less than four restaurants (from the four star really classy to the normal bar and restaurant to the pick up window and a café on a docked boat.) And then right in front you can buy all sorts of fresh seafood by the pound fresh off the boat. It’s really nice. They got just about everything.

One problem my mom was telling me about this morning though is the fact that now my relatives want to eat every meal with us. My parents really wanted some time to theirselves every once and a while to do what they want, eat what they want, and relax. The problem is that we want to eat seafood every night, but Tiger and her family, since she has little kids, don’t, and yet Snoupy would like seafood every night too, so she would want to eat with us whenever they were eating meat. Tiger thinks this then means that we are cooler or something, or Snoupy would rather spend time with us, or some other nonsense, so now we have to schedule all of our meals together, much to my mother’s chagrin. Of well, we’ll live.

(5:00PM)

Interestingly enough, after I just got done with my rant about the beach and all of its evils, around 4:30 my dad stated that he was going to join the rest of the family down at the beach, and since by that point the clouds had rolled in and it was getting cool outside, I decided to go down and just say hi to everyone down there since I knew that it would make them ever so happy. So my dad and I walk down, talking about the books that we are reading, and just as we get to my family’s place on the beach it starts to rain. So I help pick up two of the beach chairs and walk right back home. As soon as I get inside, the sprinkling stops. See, it’s not just me; the beach and I have an understanding. We don’t like each other. It’s as simple as that.

(Note: A little while afterwards it did start raining again, but I don’t think my point has been lost.)