Pictures Would Help

I was doing well for a while when it came to taking pictures to put on this blog, but lately I have... not.  Pictures exist of these events, I just do not have them.

This past Saturday I picked up Beau at Dulles airport and we then spent the day in Baltimore.  We had a late lunch at that same Afghan Kabob place I went to with Tyler about a month ago, and yet this time the chickpeas seemed somewhat less magical than before.  Then we went to the National Aquarium and looked at fish in tanks for the entire afternoon.  Worth doing once, but in the end they still were just a lot of fish in tanks.  Beau also bought a kindle while we were downtown, and then we went to dinner with Liza at a sushi place. 

On Sunday Beau and I headed into DC for a Third of July party hosted by my first roommate ever, C'pher.  There were about seven other guys from our Woodberry class who showed up and we had a good time reminiscing.  We even took a picture to be (supposedly) sent to the Wofo magazine.  There was a vote as to how the picture should be composed, and the standard all-of-us-standing-with-one-another won out over all-of-us-helping-one-of-us-do-a-kegstand.  I feel like we have better odds of making it into the magazine now.  The edible highlight of the party was C'pher's award winning (third place in a Washington Post contest) sauce which was generously ladled onto every serving of brisket and burger.

The next morning we headed down to the beach, which is where I am now typing this from the shielded confines of the beach house as I have quarantined myself for sunburn-repair.  Brian and Kay arrived in the evening and the four of us participated in our now traditional first-night-of-the-beach-grilling session.  It was, as always, an enormous success... though we did note with some small measure of sadness that part of the fun had always been how much we sucked at actually getting everything prepared and cooked, and yet this year we were downright efficient and professional about it.  Clearly we need to find something to increase the challenge for next year. Later that night we went down to the beach to enjoy the amateur firework shows.  Drunk people lighting explosives five feet away from you is always a fun and safe way to celebrate the birth of our nation.

We spent the next day at the beach, and I alternated between reading The Historian, an intriguing book about Dracula which Kayface lent me, The Big Short, an analysis of the 2008 financial meltdown which Beau lent me, and The Time Machine, an H.G. Wells classic which I hadn't yet read but which I managed to work through whenever Beau left his kindle unattended.  At this point I have finished both The Big Short and The Time Machine, both of which were excellent for completely different reasons.

The four of us went out for seafood Tuesday night and then went to play minigolf.  I always forget, until the moments just before we start playing, that Brian used to be on some sort of minigolf-playing-team and that his brother was at one point the top ranked minigolf player in Virginia, or something like that.  Playing minigolf with Brian, then, is more about saving face than it is ever about winning, which you simply can't do.  As predicted, Brian destroyed us all and was up by something like eight strokes over whoever was in second place (which obviously wasn't me and so is not worth remembering). 

Yesterday Brian and Kay took off back to Philly (it's an understandably busy month for them) and my dad and sister showed up around two.  We have continued... you know, just doing the beach thing, which is great.  After this week I have convinced Rachel to come back up to Baltimore with me in order to help me out with some recording things.  In return I've agreed to help her out with a few songs that she needs to learn for auditions when she starts college in August. 

For the rest of the day, if you need to find me, I'll likely be on the deck on the roof reading.  I will not have my phone, for this is the beach- and such is the tradition.