This morning we all got up and I don’t think anybody showered before heading off to the beach.

Oh, I forgot the sunburn report.  Ben was mostly okay.  The backs of Jessica’s knees, of all places, were horribly burnt.  She thinks maybe it was because of sweat.  Amanda and I used spray-on suntan lotion, which worked great last weekend, but not so great this weekend.  Amanda has a stripe up her sides and a little burnage on her back.  I’m burned pretty much everywhere- most notably my neck, my nose, the backs of my arms and my back, particularly my left side.  After this heals up I’m going to try the spray stuff again, but I’m going to put it on thick and make sure I rub it in all over.  I think the problem, for me anyway, was that I didn’t much rub it in.

Back to today.  Ben and I dropped the girls off to order some Chick-Fil-A breakfast while he and I ran to Harris Teeter to grab some waters and coffee.  (Amanda and Ben are the coffee drinkers.)  Then we went on out to the beach and ate and sat around.  The Lambeths brought an umbrella, which they and I pretty much stayed under the whole time.  I also brought a hat and didn’t bother taking off my holey white t-shirt.  Amanda and I brought the beach chairs we’d gotten from my parents’ Chinese Christmas.  They’re standard foldout lawn chairs, but there’s a hole for you to put your face through if you want to read while on your stomach or you can flip some padding up through it and use it as a pillow of sorts.  Pretty cool.  Along with Bocce and Horse Nuts, the chairs have attained keep-in-the-car-for-the-summer status.

I hate that my back was so burned- there were some decent waves out today.  We did play Horse Nuts today though.  Amanda and Jessica beat me and Ben two times to one to make it a best of five (including a game where they beat us yesterday).  Ben and I won pretty good one game, but in the others Amanda and Jessica each had a round of scoring six more more points.

I got a couple text messages from Mike Boscaljon about meeting up at the beach but he was working until 1:00 and Ben and Jessica were planning on leaving Wilmington around that time, so we didn’t hook up.

As early as we got to the beach and left it today, it didn’t take nearly as long to get off Wrightsville Beach today.  We did got by Trolley Stop, the one off of College, for lunch and we stopped by Chick-Fil-A again for milkshakes.  Amanda got her lunch there though, as she’s not big into hotdogs.

Ben and Jessica showered then packed up and left for Winston-Salem.  We’d love for them to move back down here.  After they left Amanda took a shower then went out to get a birthday present for her cousin, Hannah Frazelle, then I took a long shower and bath.  I ran hot water over my burns and rinsed off a bit then turned the shower into a bath to try to soak in the heat.  Yeah, it hurts, but it feels a bit better afterwards.  John Quinn had told me that when the Quinns went to the beach with us one summer.  I don’t know if it really does much of anything, but it makes me feel better anyway.

With all the showers that had been taken I ran out of hot water, but I soaked for a while in what I had before getting out, going downstairs and finishing up the book Ben and Jessica had given me for my birthday: True Blue: A Tribute to Mike Krzyzewski’s Career at Duke.  I was reading it a bit in the bath and thought since I was about done I’d just finish it up.  I really enjoyed it.  It gave me a lot of perspective on things at Duke that I was too young to remember.\

Amanda came back and watched a bit of TV while I played some Grand Theft Auto IV.  After that we both picked at leftovers and watched the last three episodes of Smallville that were left for the season along with the most recent episode of The Soup.  Lex finally got to learn the truth about Clark and Jimmy proposed to Chloe but she was arrested by federal agents before she could answer.  After we finished those we flipped around and came to a show on the Biography Channel called I Survived, which seems to basically be like I Shouldn’t Be Alive, except it’s not just man versus nature.

Then Amanda went to bed and I caught up on all of this.

Happy Memorial Day!

Zach Dotsey