Better living with Minnie

Another afternoon of near sleeping, but not as annoying as the first. Then I was recovering from an evening of sordid excess (one that merits its own entry), but today it was only four loads of laundry that wiped me out. After an hour or so of lying there with my eyes clothes on the verge of tantalising sleep, close enough to spin fantasies with the surreality of dreams but without the relaxation of being under, I suited up and went out for a walk.

The day turned out better than I could've imagined when I awoke to clouds and wind. The sun was all but full and the breeze from the north was more refreshing than chilling. I headed right for the hill (yes, there's only one--and people who live around real hills would call it a mound at best) so I could get a 360° view. Only the hardiest futbolistas seemed to be out on the fields below.

At the entrance to Bobolink Meadow, I unexpectedly ran into my fellow daddy-fancier from work. Even more unexpectedly, I found out he's an opera fan and we spent a pleasant while discussing Lyric productions and our favourite sopranos before he rode off on his bike and I hiked over to see what's become of the point renovations. The stretches of dirt are overground with some waist-high plants that look too homogenous to be weeds. Some combination of soil stabilisation and soil restoration, to be plowed under before landscaping starts in earnest next spring?

Near there, I caught sight of either a hawk or a kestrel. Before I could really get a good look at it, it flew off deeper into the brush and, in the course of tracking it down again, I ran into a roped-off area no more worse off than most of the grounds, so I'm not sure what they're protecting it from. While extricating myself, I inadvertantly caught the attention of a white-moustache daddy who ended up pursuing me to other side of the point. Even pointedly staring at the sea didn't shake him; I had to head off onto the beach and hop a fence.

To augment my appearance of inaccessibility, I'd put in my earbuds and turned on the iPod I'd been wearing since I left the house; I ended up wearing it all the way back to monshu's, altering my pace to match the beat of each song. I passed another white-haired man who was happily amusing himself with a canary-yellow soccer ball and then got distracted by parasailers and a quartet of chubby Latinos, half of whom were wading through the surf.

The breeze was stiff here and the whitecaps were rolling in. I had to dodge some spray on my route northward, since I skipped along the lowest tier of the seawall and the hollows in the worn limestone blocks were all filled with pools of lakewater.