Well, it's under 48 hours until I fly away on our mini-vacation in Washington state. Lyric and I have been trading links to restaurants, ferry rides, and whale-watching cruises. We've got our movie list, our passports (in case we take the ferry to Canada), some books, music, tourist brochures, and maps. We haven't decided what all we're going to do, but we have committed to one thing: OD'ing on shrimp.

I studiously avoid watching CNN unless there's a specific reason that outweighs my distaste of their journalistic slant. But Saturday morning, while trying to escape from the highly annoying Bulls and Bears on FOX, I happened to see something of interest. I know a lot of you are Gray's Anatomy fans, and like me you might enjoy seeing a real-life Gray's, in this case entitled "Grady's Anatomy." Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the CNN Health editor, is on staff at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and when he's not on TV or in the O.R. he's supervising residents there. This series will follow several of those residents, including chronicling the tough task of integrating a personal life with an 80-hour a week work schedule. I'm planning to check it out tonight at 7, 8ET. And if it conflicts with your love for Amazing Race: All Stars or Extreme Home Makeover, it might be worth TiVo'ing or taping!

Plans continue for our trek to Red River in July. This might be the last time that so many of us will be taking the trip together so we want to make it really special. Aging grandparents, grown-up children spreading out across the continent, and increasingly complex schedules make it more of a challenge every year (we haven't been in nine or ten years!) so we are all looking forward to the time we'll spend together. Soon I'll move the Red River ticker to the top of my page :-)

I'm finally admitting to myself that it's time to peel off a couple layers of the bed linens. Seems a shame when it's barely spring, but I'm afraid our cold nights are over and if I want to keep my bed dressed for winter I'll have to set the air conditioning at an obscenely low temperature. And for that, do you know how many carbon credits I'd have to buy from Al Gore? We'd have a "carbon footprint" the size of Sasquatch!

I'm finishing up the book 1491 (see sidebar). It's been on my iPod, and despite my intense interest in the topic, the original inhabitants of Mesoamerica, I could hardly keep my eyes open through this whole thing. I'll lay part of it at the feet of what I consider to be a particularly bad narrator, but I'm not sure that even reading it in hard copy would have salvaged it for me. Some interesting moments, to be sure, but....yeah.

Is it still five more months until football? *Sigh* Okay, well then I'm off for my nap....

Labels: Books, TV, Vacations