Picnic Days

Today, we took the opportunity of the 82 degree weather, sun and new picnic basket that my mother gave Ben for his birthday to have a beach outing. It's been a pretty good week, all in all. I set up an appointment for early September to go over the details of the flowers with the floral designer, and we're taking care of a few final things for the wedding next week such as favors, picking up Ben's new (tailored!) suit, and applying for that very necessary marriage license. We had dinner at Meritage on Tuesday, which is the restaurant at the Boston Harbor Hotel that does their catering and (as we found out) has spectacular food. So our food should be great. We also booked a cruise to Alaska for next summer - a Princess cruise, round-trip from Seattle, hitting such ports as Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan and Victoria. All I really care about is the dog sledding!

So, with all of this happening, we rewarded ourselves with a picnic - a little different from our usual reward of going to the book store or Red Mango. It was a modest picnic - some sushi, potato salad, fruit, cheese, crackers, and juice - but it was nice nevertheless. Oh, and something that we got a Fresh Market called "banana pudding", which is pretty much heaven in a little plastic cup.


We went to the beach that's about .5 miles from our apartment and always fairly empty and laid out my very comfortable double-towel to do a little reading. After finally getting Ben to pick up the first Game of Thrones book, he's hooked and won't put it down. I'm reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about 6 months behind all the cool people, but hey, my pile of books to read is very tall. I should take a picture of it sometime. But anyway. Off we went into the sun and sand.

And it was nice for about an hour until it became unbearably hot. We returned home about 20 minutes ahead of the massively down-pouring thunderstorm, with bright pink sun-burned backs because we didn't think the sun could possibly be that bad on an hour-long picnic and didn't bring sunscreen. Oh, well. It was still nice to get out! Hopefully next weekend my outing will be to the mall.