Day 7 (Friday, August 1)

(12:50PM)

Ok, I’ve been a little lax in updating the old journal recently. Now I’m going to try to go back in time and reconstruct what happened the second half of this week.

Why have I not been updating? Well, since Tuesday it has been raining off and on here, meaning, more often than not the family has been around. I tend to like to write in solitude, and when your cousins are bouncing around the room, that’s not really conducive to “private time writing”.

That, and I’ve been reading Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz for the past two days. I was reading a Vietnam book that I’ll get back to when I’m done with this one, but this one is so damn interesting I can’t put it down, hence the lack of posting. I guess my dad gave it to my uncle for a birthday or Christmas or something (since they now live “down South” in Virginia) and both he and my aunt read it and really enjoyed it, so they brought it over to our house so that my dad could read it. I noticed it sitting on the coffee table, read the back cover and then became curious, so I started to read the introduction. Since then I’ve barely put it down.

Tony Horwitz is a reporter/writer who goes down South to try to understand why the Civil War and the Confederacy never really left the collective consciousness of them. It’s amazing how many different reasons they have for keeping the memory of the Civil War alive, and it all doesn’t boil down to “These people are just uneducated rednecks”, although you meet plenty of people in the book who do fit that description. And yet no one in the book really fits an easy description, which is a testament to how well written and researched this book was. He always hears everyone out and avoids passing judgment whenever possible. I’m halfway through right now, and I’d already recommend it to everyone to read. It helps you understand a little bit of where the South is coming from. Plus you get to know the difference between a “farb” and something “super hardcore”.

Also yesterday was filled with a little gaming. I pulled out the Trivia Pursuit mid-afternoon and we got a family game going. That almost ended up being a mistake. With every question the family was this close to coming to blows. I’m not entirely sure why. I think we are all a little hyper critical of each other. I mean, I personally almost jumped across the table when my mom and sister couldn’t answer the following question: “Which Beatles album cover shows Paul walking barefoot with a cigarette in his hand.” To me, this is an instant no brainer. I thought it would be to just about everyone else too. I mean, the Abbey Road album cover is one of the most famous ever made. My sister even knew that it had something to do with a “street”. I ended up beating my fists against my temples while they struggled for the answer miles away from where they should be.

The entire time we were playing a soft mist of a rain came down that wasn’t really rain, but at the same time wasn’t really sunny dryness either. For the first half of the game my dad commented about how it was raining and how we should move inside and my mom couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then for the second half of the game she seemed to suddenly notice the rain and joke about moving in. Let it be known that everyone had been drinking as well, except for myself, who had already started a Pepsi before my cousins came over and drank them all. The Margaritas that my mother and sister were drinking were also apparently a little stronger than usual.

My aunt Snoupy actually came over at one point to hang out and quickly left after sensing the tension in the house. I apologize to all of you who don’t know how many teats a cow has, and had to thus hear me bitch “How could you not know that?” I’ve lived in cow country for most of my life, and so too, obviously, have my parents (my dad even grew up on a semi-farm), and yet neither my mom nor my dad could tell me how many teats a cow had. I mean, cows are everywhere. There are plush toys in stores all over the place. Cartoon cows sell milk on TV. I’ve seen probably at least a dozen movies where someone milked a cow. We are surrounded by dairy farms. How could they not know? Why does no one pay attention when someone milks a cow? Are they just bashful? I can’t even begin to understand.

(The answer, by the way, is four, NOT six.)

My sister and I also played a game called Sequence with my aunt and uncle, and Matthew and Susan last night. I’ve never seen this game before, but it is pretty easy to play. The game board has two of every card in a deck of cards on it, and what you do is when you are dealt a hand you are suppose to try to set up “sequences” of five by using one card at a time to place down a chip, much like you would do in Connect Four. First to two sequences wins.

My sister and I were on a team together. I think our big mistake was to right off from the start jokingly call ourselves the “Forces of Evil”, to which my aunt and uncle started to call themselves the “Forces of Good.” Guess who won all three games? Damn it, even evil wins some of the time!

That day I also took a bike ride with my dad around Cape May Point. My dad is the WORST person to follow on a bike. He slows down and stops at random places. He never signals when he is going to turn until he is actually into the turn. His awareness of where I am, and what my actual skills with a bike are are poor at best. He’s crazy. The bike ride was nice though.

Dinner was good, as usual. (although it is driving my mother mad. More on that in a later post) We had a crab/clam corn chowder (or something), stuffed crab on portabella mushrooms and really tasty mild fish (that I can’t remember the name of—it was pretty crazy) covered with a fresh chopped tomato salsa and guacamole. It was really good. The night before we had had a meal of bacon wrapped scallops, mussels in the shell and shrimp cocktail. This meal was also quite excellent. I probably ate way more than I should have. I probably downed a good quarter of the mussels myself.

I’m going to try to fill in the other days of the week that I missed now. Wherever I have a date with no time, you’ll know I did that after the fact.

(9:45PM)

I finally just went out on my own to see 28 Days Later today. I made a promise that I was going to see it this week, and damn it, I did. I rode down on my bike to the beach side movie theater in Cape May.

Interesting story: While I was watching the movie, which is pretty creepy to begin with, about halfway through it there was this HUGE “ka-BOOOOOM” outside. I think everyone was a little confused about where that came from. It sounded like a car bomb going off or something. Anyway, about a minute later the movie stops and the lights go up. Now everyone is pretty creeped out. There is no explanation from the staff, and then a minute later the movie goes on.

So you could say that by the end of the movie I was really curious as to what happened outside. As I walked out of the door I could see that the streetlight was now out and some cops were directing traffic. All four corners were out, but otherwise everyone else had power. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that lightning had hit the stoplight while I was in the theater. Wow. Groovy.

—–Final dinner: Tuna steaks again, this time with the avacado butter and salsa, lots of bread, and all of the ice cream you could eat [because if you didn’t eat it, it would just be thrown out the next day.]