The day didn’t start off too busy, but it got that way this afternoon.  I picked up my paycheck and met Amanda for lunch at J Michael’s then went to the bank, and by the time I got back to work I had enough to keep me busy enough that I couldn’t work on the stuff I was working on yesterday.

After work I headed out to Wrightsville Beach for the newly titled Wednesday Night Surf Club.  Michael Mercer got there in time to go look at the waves and come back just as Lars Boscaljon was pulling up to the Frazelle house on his scooter.  I drove up just as the garage door was closing behind the two of them.

When I got inside after I changed downstairs they were talking with Barry about the waves.  There’s a storm that might turn into a named tropical storm (Kyle would be its name, according to Michael, who keeps up with such things) that is churning up a lot of waves.  The general consensus was that it was not a day for us to go surfing.  Michael, Lars and I walked out to check it out, and sure enough, the waves were pretty angry.  They were almost coming in sideways, the wind and the rip current were so bad.  There was a lot of water too; at mid-tide the water was already covering much of the beach.  The wind was causing the sand to sting our legs something fierce.

All of this was a bit of a surprise to me as I haven’t been keeping up with the weather lately.

Back at the house, Lars and I talked about going out anyway since we were already there, but we eventually decided not to.  Barry decided to walk out to the beach with us again after he finished his dinner, so the four of us walked to the Oceanic and up the steps to Crystal Pier.  The waves weren’t as bad as before, but the water was all mush.  You could see really big waves on the horizon over at Masonboro Island.  It was cool to see waves cleave themselves on the jetty too.  The water had come up to the dunes.

There were a few people out, seemingly for our entertainment.  We watched them drift from well past the north side of the pier all the way down to Access 39, where we usually came out to the beach.  All in all I think we watched five people.  Two of them were bodyboarders and they eventually caught some waves in.  There was one guy we watched walk out and get in the water and you could see him lining his body perpendicular to the shore but moving diagonally as he paddled out.  There were two more people we saw one one side of the pier who ended up way down on the other side of it.  We kept waiting for them to go for some waves and when they finally did one of them cartwheeled off his surfboard.  We all cheered when he finally got up, but when he cartwheeled off it drew a collective “OOOOOH!”

Those two eventually came in and we waited around to see the guy who was by himseld catch a wave.  He did really well with it, but when he paddled back out afterwards we all decided we were bored and cold and went back in.

The sunset was pretty.  It was turning the sky over the ocean and the shallow water purple.

After we got back, Michael, Lars and I decided to grab some food, so we split a pizza at Vito’s, a pretty good deal for $5 apiece.  Michael said he would have gotten two pieces and said it probably would have been cheaper for him to buy them separately, so I asked and the guy said indicidual slices were $2.68 each.  Michael ended up with two and a half slices (the half split with me- Lars got his own third piece), so he came out on top.

I headed home after that.  I talked to Joey Palieri, who was briefly in town.  We didn’t get a chance to meet up.

Amanda and I watched last week’s season premiere episode of House on the computer because the DVR has been funny lately and we’ve had to reset a lot of the programs it was previously set to record.  Amanda went to bed after that and I messed around on the computer a bit, chatting with my sister, Erin Dotsey, and my cousin, Francis Horner, via Facebook.

Erin sounds like she’s doing alright for herself.  She got an apartment in Raleigh and it working from home.  She’s dating a guy named Terry who she sounded pretty pleased with.  She’s having some back problems though.  They sounded pretty serious when she listed them to me, but she said she’s going to physical therapy and is doing better.

I think I might go play some Halo 3 with Michael and Chris Flowers.

Zach Dotsey