So, Friday both the kids had sleepover parties to attend.  Hubby and I broke out the movies we couldn’t watch with them.  First we watched “Monster”, the movie with Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, about serial killer Aileen Wuornos.  It was a pretty darned good movie, and Theron had a lot of guts to look the way she did in it.  She gave an excellent performance, and was very good at being a sympathetic character all the way up to the point where she snapped, and even then portrayed that self-justification the woman had for what she did.  Next, we watched Mystic River.  It was great, too – until the end.  There was absolutely no foreshadowing, and no justification for the (ahem) “twist” at the end.  The cast was brilliant, the script was great, and then the resolution of the murder came completely out of left field.  Good thing I was so tired at that point that I had to go to bed right away, or I would have been really, really angry.

Yesterday morning, we picked the poor tired children up from their parties.  They said they weren’t tired, but you could tell they were running on adrenaline.  We went to another party at my friend Janet’s house after they were all cleaned up and changed.  She and her husband Jim put on a lovely party twice a year for Solstices, and it’s always fun to see this group of people.  The weather was rotten, so we didn’t do any hanging out in the backyard, but there was plenty of room inside to circulate.  We left a bit after 7, and the weather didn’t seem so bad until about the time we hit Monmouth County.  The rain was torrential, and when we were almost home, the lightning was so close that it lit everything up like daylight and made the hair on our arms stand up.  It kind of made me miss the old house a bit, because when it stormed, we could go out on the front porch and watch it.  Our front door is under cover, but it’s not anything close to a porch.

So today, I woke up at 5-something.  Not quite 5:30.  I’m tired.  My back was hurting too much to sleep.  I have a whole bunch of things I want to do today, but right now, if I thought there was any chance of falling back to sleep, I’d be in bed.  Since I can’t, of course, I feel too miserably tired to get myself motivated to do any of the things I wanted to do.  I’ll have to force myself, I think, because one of them is to exercise, and that will help me sleep.  It’s one of those little unfair things – you can’t sleep because you need to get more exercise and lose weight, but you’re so tired you can’t even think about exercise.  Eh.  I’ll make the grocery list and the dinner menus for the week.  Then I’ll shop and get the Asbury Park Press to look for jobs.  I’ll start the bread dough.  By that time, maybe the hubby will be up and I can pull out the treadmill.

So the Zurlos came down with the Snellen kids in tow, and hubby took them off to the beach while I headed downtown to take my Oral Proficiency Test in Spanish.  I met them afterwards.  The water was cold, which kept the adults out, but didn’t deter the kids.  We ate terribly unhealthy boardwalk food – more than once.  A good time was had by all, and it’s so nice to be close to the ocean.  The air temperature had to be almost 20 degrees cooler than at home, only a 10 minute drive away.

So, last night I was dreaming about teaching Spanish, and in my dream, I was trying to teach the students the names of car parts – when I realized I didn’t know the words for brakes, bumper, steering wheel.  Woke up in a bit of a panic.  Well, sure enough, I get to the roleplay part of the test, and the adminstrator says “You’ve borrowed my car and had an accident.  Tell me what happened, and what you’re going to do to compensate me.”  Dayum!  So I finally get it out that I got rear ended, and the car can be driven, but still needs the back end fixed.  The other driver didn’t have insurance, so I’m going to pay for her to use a cab while it’s being fixed.  She says to me, (in Spanish) “I’m so lucky to have a friend that will pay for a cab for me while my car is being fixed!” and I responded (in Spanish) “You’re lucky to have a friend who speaks Spanish as a >second< language!” (Funny because of the amount of stumbling I did over the vocabulary!)