Our week at the beach was quite nice, with way too much eating and drinking, sunny days in the 70s mixed in with frigid and windy days in the 40s, and some fine quality time with the fam. I feel pretty confident about my Trivial Pursuit and Yahtzee skills now.

The place we stayed for the week was called The Dreamcatcher -- here's a photo:

I also got to read a bit, including about half the stories in the most recent Best American Short Stories. I was surprised that I liked so many of them, and my favorites were "Kavita Through Glass" by Emily Raboteau and "Rationing" by Mary Waters and "Johnny Hamburger" by Rand Cooper. Some of them were so-so, like Dan Chaon's "The Bees" (ending fell flat for me) and "Ghost Knife" by Sharon Pomerantz (uninteresting protagonist, but a great ending) and the over-rated Mona Simpson, whose "Coins" was as plot-less and lame as it gets. Looks like Tin House, which had three stories in the antho, would be a good magazine/journal to track down (they even had an SF story in the antho!).

Overall, I wasn't all that excited by the stories in the anthology. Almost all of them were relationship stories, not really deep in scope, and many of them covered a long period of time for their characters, like a novel in miniature, and didn't have fully-realized scenes. It was odd -- very distancing. And many stories ended on a moment of hope coming from a small gesture, which was interesting (and in some cases, that moment wasn't wholly deserved). But I saw some techniques that I'd like to try, so it was definitely time well-spent.

Back to beach -- the house was on Hatteras Island, on North Carolina's Outer Banks, and the landscape was still pretty ravaged by Hurricane Isabel from back in September. Sand was everywhere, thick as snow, and the realtor had to send a guy with a tractor and plow to dig out the sand in our driveway. My second-favorite image from the week was the sprinkler systems on the golf course next to the house, watering the drifting sand blown over the greens:



My favorite image of the week was watching Whit the Wonder Pup race up and down the beach (at least until the Park Ranger doofuses came up and told us to leash him on the mostly deserted beach). We didn't get a photo of him running, but there was one moment when he just opened up with a burst of greyhound speed and tore down the beach. And to think that I was afraid he'd run off -- he was incredibly well-behaved:



But yeah, the whole area is still recovering from the damage caused by the hurricane, and one of the property owners had been there since September, supervising the overhaul of his flooded beachfront house, and he was planning on being there 'til March or so. That's a risk you take, I guess, owning a beach house. As a constant reminder of this, just a half mile down from us was the ruined pier, where the first 50 feet are missing:



We ended up coming back a day early for a post-Thanksgiving delivery -- Elizabeth's sister gave birth to "Baby Ellie" Friday night, and we made the 6-hour drive back Saturday morning.

And that's how I spent my Thanksgiving. Now, it's diet time...