Day 363: Rainy and Windy — Beach and Writing

We really did pick one of the best ways ever to finish out the year. We keep saying, “Can you imagine if we were skiing in Japan right now?” “Can you imagine if we were at a crowded Kauai resort right now?”

Instead we have this quiet, sunny house away from the fray, haven’t eaten in a restaurant all week (and probably won’t), with plenty of room for everyone to spread out and do their own thing.

There’s not much to report from today. The morning was rainy and overcast. The kids amused themselves for hours after breakfast by reading, painting, playing “their own” music on a Spotify setup and eventually, making a series of funny stop-motion videos on their iPads.

Willa painted this and wrote up some kind words about her parents:

After lunch, we set them up to watch the original “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (can’t believe we didn’t do this after reading the book way back in the first part of the year — a favorite) while we continued to tend to various writing projects. The “content’ card on our family Trello board has 18 individual checklist items I want to tackle. One of them is “Write book.” Ha!

One smaller to-do was to create month-by-month photo compilations for each of us to see how we’ve changed. Teddy and I are tanner and more weathered looking, Willa and James are seriously older/wiser. Fun to see.

Teddy left me to take the kids to another beach for a few hours. There weren’t many people around because of the weather, but they had fun building another sand castle.

I think under any other circumstances I’d feel pretty lame about coming to one of the most beautiful places on Earth and ….sitting in front of a laptop all day. But I’m okay with it — all this writing is my peaceful closure. A quiet desk surrounded by windows looking out onto misty Hawaiian mountains is just too good.

I put out the call on Instagram for questions about our return and got really strong response. Most questions have already been addressed in stuff we’ve written, so it’ll be easy to compile answers, but there were some that no one had ever asked us before, like this one from Camille: “What’s something you used to do all the time in NYC that you can’t imagine doing now,” and this from our former neighbor in NYC: “What are you grateful for now versus this time last year.” Good ones! 

By 6:30 we were eating dinner and winding down. We needed a new book after nearly two months spent reading the Hobbit! We settled on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and I read them the first two chapters. Already it’s much easier reading than ol’ Tolkien.

I finished the day with almost 30,000 words in this “book.” I put it in parentheses because odds are this will get printed up at Kinkos or whatever for Willa and James to enjoy and treasure — and not go further than that. But we’ll see, I guess.