Fay Stays

Again with the rough surf and riptides and winds. No swimming again. And no looking out the windows at the surf, either, as the windows are salted over from the sea spray. Luckily there are two hammocks on the veran-dah, and if you don't mind being blown out of it now and then you can lie back and watch the waves. We are all hoping something interesting will be washed up before we leave.

So we pursue the other time-honored vacation activites. Yesterday my daughter learned two new card games from her grandmother. SHe is now a pretty decent bridge partner and can play "casino"- a tradition, her grandmother insists, that was passe don to her by her own grandma.

While my daughter was honing her card-shark skills I took the three resident teenagers to the movies. We saw "Tropic Thunder." It's a decent summer vacation movie. Unfortunately the biggest laughs for me were in the first five minutes of the film, which made the rest seem kind of slow.

DIH has also done the traditional browsing of the vacation cottage bookshelves. There is one book of rules of games. Handy, as it keeps us from pistols at twenty paces. There are the requisite ancient Leon Uris paperbacks. There are also a few "classics" like obviously left behind by some poor high school kid with a summer reading list. Never waste time trying to read Hawthorne at the beach, I always say. Stick to mysteries like "The Lincoln Lawyer." More edifying and more fun.

Sad to say, we leave tonight. So I guess I better go finish "The Lincoln Lawyer" now.