Aw, Summer, We Hardly Knew Ye

Josh is riding in the bike portion of a relay triathlon to raise money for Children's Hospital Los Angeles in Malibu next weekend (yeah, that's right: saint). He's been training around our neighborhood, but he wanted to peep the race course before hitting it for real. So we packed up the towels and snacks and made a beach day of it.

It's wasn't crowded and we bought a beach umbrella for $10 from a vendor on the sand, and it wasn't too hot but the water was warm. No one got sunburned and we ate sandwiches (appropriately named because they were mostly sand). There was a lot of digging and building and jumping and falling and it was an amazing, beautiful day at the beach.

Yeah, I'm wearing that dress again. What?

His favorite part was when he got to stomp the shit out of those castles.

After the beach we had a second lunch at Marmalade (what? the beach makes you hungry. it's scientifically proven). The last time I was at Malibu Marmalade was with Pat Benatar & her husband, Spider (I used to work in music p.r.), and it was literally everything I could do to not just start crying about the fact that I was sitting there with Pat Fucking Benatar. (Here is my favorite Pat Benatar story: Rolling Stone wanted to include an interview with Pat in their Women of Rock issue--a really, really big deal because it was 1997 and no one had really spent a lot of time thinking about Pat Benatar for about 10 years and it was a huge coup for her and, frankly, for me. When I called her to conference in the reporter for the interview, she said to us both, "You know what? I'm making chicken cutlets right now. Can I call you back?" at the time I tried to murder her over the phone with sheer will. But now that I'm a working wife and mother, I totally get it. The woman had her priorities perfectly in order). Anyway, at Marmalade the boys went to the bathroom for, like, 20 hours, so I took a number of pictures of Batman.

After his plain noodles with butter ($7--is it gauche that I keep noting the prices of things here? It's not that I'm cheap. I just cannot believe the nerve sometimes) Dash got a giant slice of double fudge bundt cake ($9). How's the cake, Dutch?

Cool.

Farewell, Summer 2009. You were the best yet and I'm a little sad to see you go.