We spent the holiday weekend off the grid, which is unusual for both of us. No phones, texts, emails or web presence from Friday afternoon until yesterday. We went to a B&B in Galveston for three nights, which was a terrific vacation. It was sunny and hot all three days. The B&B had a nice little swimming pool in a well appointed side yard that we had to ourselves. None of the other three couples boarding there availed themselves of it. We were half a dozen blocks away from the seawall and fairly close to the Strand as well. Had lots of great seafood. Watch a Carnival cruise ship depart on Sunday afternoon, accompanied by a couple of dolphins who came in the channel to swim beside the massive ship. Took a nice long walk along the seawall on Sunday evening when it was cooler.
Ever since our trip to Sonoma a while back, we’ve become fans of red zinfandel wine. We always said that we never had a bad one. Even the $7.99 bottles were okay. We finally found one that we’ll never buy again. Because we didn’t want to take anything glass to the pool, we picked up a Bota Box of red zin. Later I noticed that it was Italian zin. Never heard of any such thing before. It was pretty bad. Tasted like it had already been open for a week. Laziness kept us from going out for a replacement, so we drank a fair amount of it, but it was pretty bad.
No writing this weekend, either, but I did get a little more done on the new short story this morning. I’m not sure I’m capturing the sense of the story that I’ve been looking for and dreaming about, but I’m getting close to the end, at least. I think it will need some heavy duty editing to whip it into shape.
I finished The Abominable by Dan Simmons. Review to come. Also finished reading Death Is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury to my wife. Started Never Look Away by Canadian thriller writer Linwood Barclay. My doctoral adviser asked if I’d ever heard of him and I hadn’t. Apparently he’s relatively unknown in Canada but a bestseller around the world. It’s a decent paranoia thriller about a woman who goes missing, leaving her husband under suspicion of having done something to her. He discovers he knew much less about her than he thought he did. Also started reading The Last Storyteller: A Novel of Ireland by Frank Delaney to my wife. We’ve read several of his earlier books and this continues the sad sack story of Ben, the collector of legends, and his erstwhile lover and mother of his children, Venetia Kelly.
I’ve been watching a Swedish crime series called Beck, based on characters created by the husband and wife authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They’re gritty tales set mostly in Stockholm. Each 90-minute episode is a self-contained story. I’ve watched the first six so far. Only one was a disappointment in that it tied together two otherwise unrelated events by the wildest of coincidences. Martin Beck is the head of a team of cops. He has the requisite struggles with a by-the-book boss, but the series doesn’t pull any punches. The sixth episode starts with the report of a bomb in a suitcase abandoned on a street. When the bomb squad blows it up, they find out there was actually a baby inside, which causes some soul searching.
Some people called this week’s episode of Breaking Bad a slow burn. Given that Jesse didn’t actually start the fire, maybe it would be better called a “no burn.” Did anyone else regret the fact that we didn’t actually see Hank briefing Gomez on his situation? How would that conversation go? Instead, we just get Gomez at Hank’s place for the debriefing. I didn’t miss a scene, did I? Though not a lot truly happened this week, the stage is being set. A nice Saul scene with another of his trademark shaggy dog stories, and an interesting opinion from Skyler about what Walt should do regarding Jesse. The final moments made me think back to a couple of Jesse’s other Eureka! moments. He’s had a couple of brilliant plans in the past (“Yo, magnetism, bitches!”), and the creepy grin at the fade to black makes me think he’ll be the one that puts this all to bed. He may be the last man standing. In a way, I hope so. His journey has really been the most rewarding and fascinating.
