Rebecca has begun the inexorable of process of picking up all my bad habits. In addition to the liberal use of profanity, she has also started to over-pack. As we were preparing for this trip, she packed almost every article of clothing she owns, and filled an entire suitcase with nothing but shoes and pocketbooks. The clothing is now flung around her room here at the beach house, in a perfect replica of her bedroom at home. Now, if only I could get her to take on my compulsive need to remove all crumbs from the kitchen counters and to order all papers into piles. Dream on…

Why is it that all fans have controls that leap directly from OFF to hurricane-force-full-blast-top-speed-on? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go from a dead stop and move gradually through the speeds until you get to the fastest rotation? If I was more cynical I might speculate that this is a representation of men’s sexual acceleration – zero to sixty with nothing in between – but even I would not make that kind of mistake.

Books: Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy. The first novel for a mother-daughter writing duo. The seams between their chapters are somewhat apparent, but the story is interesting and holds together even through the ending. I’m a sucker for these Midwestern sheriff/cop thrillers, even if they’re not great literature.

Movies: The Cooler. William Macy is wonderful as a “cooler” – a casino-hired gambler who cools off the tables (shuts down the winning of customers) with the mere force of his own poor luck. No event in this film is as it appears on the surface. Alec Baldwin seems to be taking on more and more of these gravelly-voiced roles that play into his ability to be the tough guy. In this, he is a brutal caricature of a casino boss, nothing like the lightweights on the Las Vegas-based TV shows. I will admit that I rented this movie not because it got great reviews (which it did), but because of a scene between William Macy and Maria Bello that was supposedly cut in its intensity in order to avoid the stigma of an NC-17 rating. It was pretty tame as it ended up in the DVD version – too bad there isn’t a director’s cut available.