Date Night

Last year, for Father's Day, my wife and my daughter promised me ten dates during the summer with my wife but without our daughter, which I believe was accomplished. It included movie matinees when Lydia would be in day care anyway, and I would take the afternoon off from work. Sometimes, it was a movie or dinner at night and we would hire a babysitter.

This year, though the explicit promise wasn't made, we are attempting to have some dates again this season. So far, we've been on two.

The first was to see the movie I've been wanting to see for months, Thank You for Smoking, which I wanted to see even before Gordon recommended it a couple months ago. I found that I smiled through the first half, but actually laughed out loud a few times during the second half, but am embarrassed to admit that I missed the Pieta reference until my wife mentioned it to me afterwards. (If you saw the movie and don't know what I'm talking about), think 16th President of the US.)

The second was to go on a boat ride provided by our realtor David on the Dutch Apple Cruise, a two-hour tour on the Hudson River from Albany, past the port to the fancy houses in Glenmont to and back. We met very interesting people, such as this Brazilian couple; her name was Maine, and she has five siblings also named after U.S. states, such as Tennessee and Maryland. Really. We talked about the English language, comic books, and a variety of other topics. There was also someone who turned out to be a neighbor of ours whose mother is a member of our church. It was a great time of great adult conversation.

One couldn't help but notice, however, how high the Hudson River was getting. And it, along with other rivers in the Northeast, would only be getting higher...
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"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" 40th Anniversary Essay Contest - deadline is July 21.
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The World e-Book Fair, sponsored by Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library, will be offering up to 300,000 books online now until August 4, 2006. Fiction, nonfiction and reference books plus classical music scores and recordings will be available for free downloading.
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Signs I blog too much:

*CBS News Sunday Morning has a piece on blogging. This is the emotional equivalent of how the death of disco was signaled when Marvel Comics came out with the Disco Dazzler (changed to Dazzler).

*I have my first blogging dream, one I can remember anyway, which goes like this:
My mother, my Grandma Williams [my mother's mother, who died in 1983], Lydia and I were in this apartment when Grandma Green [my father's mother, who died in the mid-1960s], comes to the screen door, sees me lying on the sofa, with Lydia sitting on my stomach. I'm trying to figure out whether I should blog about the fact that my mother and father have separated. [My father died in 2000, and they never separated.]