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you can’t help but love a woman who will go skip r…

you can’t help but love a woman who will go skip rocks with you in the dead of night. it was pretty crappy weather yesterday, which never happens, and i went to a wedding reception for two people who are in south pacific (opens this friday! be there!). afterwards chloe and i hit the pond: out by the res there is plenty of space to act juvenile and play loud music. which is exactly what we did: roll down the car windows, turn up the radio, and skip rocks down on the beach. of course, it brought me right back to how we met, me skipping rocks and her running by. the beach was muddy though, and not too good for skippng rocks, but we could hear the music, so we danced (in the moonlight, on the beach, after a rainstorm: it would have been the fulfillment of a perfect romantic fantasy, but it was butt freezing) jitterbug and practiced waltzing to country. the thing to have been doing, really, was toasting s’mores, but no fires are allowed at the boulder res, and we had no graham crackers or marshmallows. i carry marshmallows in the car just in case (you can never be too sure!) but it was not to be. without any way to toast them, they’re just puffy crap that sticks to the roof of your mouth like so much confectioners sugar, not that i would know.

but we both had running shoes in the car, and, well, what better way to warm up? mind out of the gutter, you’re not privy to that kind of information. we laced them up and headed out, at midnight. counterclockwise, and pretty sedate. we weren’t even the only ones out, which cut down on the creep-out factor for me. i’ve always had a problem with running in the dark, i’m afraid some large-toothed animal is going to leap out of the bushes and tear me limb from limb. not that chloe herself helped assuage the fear, but all the other people around reassured me that running around the res at night wasn’t the act of a total lunatic. so chloe and i talked, about nothing in particular and the need for tighter doping controls at road races. should we take a bike ride sometime, it didn’t snow much this winter, what’s the name of those birds with the long balck and white tails, we ought to go on the celestial seasonings tour, spikes in the 10k, wheat white or rye, whats your favorite color. it took way too little time to get back to the car and both of us had to get home, but it was a grand time. need i say it again? smitten.

today i taught a sunday school class about buddhism. we covered the basic tenets, tangentially, via a group exercise on patience and frustration (“no talking!”) and a guided meditation to hell. i cannot recommend guided meditation highly enough: soft music plays in the background, or beethoven’s 9th if thats all you’ve got, and someone talks you through a relaxation and an actual journey (“you see a coconut lying on the sand in front of you, and you pick it up. inside it is a bird…”). they can be incredibly relaxing and powerful, a really fun exercise for discussion afterward because invariably everyone experiences it in a different way. our mind journey went via the flatirons, a powerful hailstorm, and a ride on the back of a dolphin. good fun, its not every day you get to take seven people to hell and back before lunch (bagel, toasted, with light cream cheese).

and carissa bought a gas grill. not an apartment-sized gas grill, suitable for use on our thirty-one square foot porch. this thing is the real mccoy, a shelf on either side and an automatic ignition. carissa doesn’t do things half-assed, and while i would find an appliance of this magnitude intimidating, she grills like a pro. spatulas quake in their boots when hey hear her approach, swinging a bottle of A1 like a .357 magnum and practically daring the steak not to cook evenly. who could help but be impressed?. plus it cuts an arresting figure out there on the porch.