Day Eighty-two: Cake cupcakes

After a breakfast of overnight cooked steel cut oats with cranberries and currants, we went for a walk on the path from Rockaway Beach to Linda Mar beach. This was really well after breakfast as we played more cribbage. I haven't been keeping score but I know my father is far far ahead on the total game count.

It took passing several people with plastic bags before I realized that today was the Coastal Cleanup day. So I started thanking them. Well, when we got to the Linda Mar side of the walk, my mother noticed the waves splashing on the rocks so we decided to walk out on the path along the cliff to look at them closer. Along the way we ran into more "cleaners," one of whom was also from West Virginia. The rest were native Californians. My father took their picture without knowing any of their names. I can see at some point we will be asking, "Who are these people?" to no avail. They did say that they didn't find very much and one guy, with a drink in each hand, complained that the others of his party, some party with two drinks, picked up all the trash before he could get to it.

You should have seen my parents (and me) hopping around on the rocks, going down and up ravines and scrambling up the steeper pebble and sand strewn slopes. Then the path ran out and we had to retrace our steps. It's harder scrambling down pebble and sand strewn slopes. We also found a decent amount of trash. I picked up three things but had to leave much more. By the time we got back out of our side trip, all the people with the Coastal Cleanup bags had disappeared. I had to carry those three items all the way back to Rockaway Beach in order to "recycle" them properly. One of them had ants. Even when they didn't crawl onto my hand, it felt they had. Life after Layoff can be "buggy" at times.

Then we went on to lunch at the Miramar Beach Restaurant. My mother decided she wanted fish so both my mother and father had fish and chips. I had a pasta primavera that really had a large variety of vegetables.

On the way home I finally stopped at the hardware store and bought the hardware to hang the big picture over the couch. They also had Liquid Fence and now I have a gallon of the stinky stuff.

For dinner, we had leftovers but I wanted to make a new batch of my chocolate cupcakes as something newly made for dessert. This is when I discovered that I only had nine cupcake papers. So after learning that my mother had put my nine-inch pyrex cake pan back in the place I normally stored it and had looked at twice, I decided to make a chocolate cake instead. While the "cake" tasted as good as the cupcakes with the same ingredients, it has one definite drawback: there is much less batter to lick. Pouring it into a pan allowed me to scrape the bowl clean. It wasn't until I was licking that I realized this significant drawback. I'm going to go and get more papers tomorrow.

We watched another free movie after dinner. Until my laptop's charge dropped into the red zone, I was also reading comments on political blogs. One comment said that SNL was great tonight. So, I'm trying to time this entry to last long enough to let me watch it right afterwards. I don't want the gap to be too long or I might be too tired to stay up. I am going to have to get DVR. But then, I shouldn't watch so much TV anyway.

Well, I didn't get this done in time to post it before SNL, which allows me to make this one last comment. I don't know whether I can stay up long enough for SNL to get great because I am doubting that this episode will. Tina Fey won't be on this one.