A day off

I decided to take the morning off from writing. That garnered me an extra two hours of much-needed sleep. I’m between projects at the moment, so if I’m going to take a brief sabbatical, now’s the time. Tomorrow I’ll have to fine-tune and post my Storytellers Unplugged essay, so it’ll be back to the desk!

I received a box of ARCs from Knopf last night. Among them, one I’ve been anticipating: The Ruins by Scott Smith. His first book, A Simple Plan was made into a memorable film starring Billy Bob Thornton. In The Ruins, two couples are in Cancun on summer vacation, where they meet up with a trio of Greeks and a German whose brother ran off into the jungle with a woman he met. The German convinces the foursome and one of the Greeks to go with him to find the archeological dig and track down his errant brother. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the taxi takes them 11+ miles off the beaten path, and then they have to trek miles and miles more through the wilderness, the group starts to wonder if they’ll ever get back to civilization. Worse, when they finally reach their destination, all manner of strange and dangerous things start happening. I’m 80 pages in and have no idea where the story is going, but it’s one of those books where I could easily be tempted to stay home from work for a day or two and read it cover-to-cover.

Watched the finales of How I Met Your Mother (cute) and Two and a Half Men (audacious, as always). Remember the days when you couldn’t say the word “pregnant” on television? Here’s an episode dealing in detail with the mechanics of sperm donation! I taped the two-hour finale of Grey’s Anatomy. I think I’m going to end up with a lot of stuff on tape to watch next weekend, with two hours of this and three hours of that and all these season-ending episodes running concurrently. Tonight it’s NCIS (1 hour) and The Unit (2 hours) and Boston Legal (2 hours), though I may give the latter a miss. The show’s amusing enough, but I’m not hooked on it.