A Change of Plans

A Saturday walkabout, a Michelada lesson, & a puppy who remembered me... aw

This is another random post because this past weekend I had a whole day mapped out.

Saturday was going to be a Book Bros redesign day — I've been working on a full UX overhaul of the site, utilizing my UX lense this time and starting with Figma mockups before I touch a line of code, mobile-first, the whole thing getting the right treatment. I had my coffee plan, my screen time plan, my "sit at the desk and be productive" plan. It was going to be a good, focused day.

Then I took Kevin (pug) outside.

Kevin is a good boy. He's shaped like a loaf of bread with legs and sounds like he's struggling to exist when he breathes, and his morning routine is a lap around the block at whatever pace his little body decides is appropriate that day. I stepped outside with him around 8 AM and just — stopped. It was beautiful. Not "oh nice, it's not freezing" beautiful, but beautiful beautiful. Warm, calm, the kind of morning where the air itself feels like it's in a good mood.

I went back inside and told Lynds to get her lazy bones out of bed (she sleeps in on Saturdays sometimes, as is her right), and while we had coffee together I pitched an audible. Forget the redesign. Let's walk to the library, then hit the boardwalk... the Book Bros can wait when the day looks like this.

She didn't need convincing and I could see the glimmer of excitement in her eyes because if there's one thing she loves to do, it's get outside.

The Sunny Day Rule

Lynds told me something once — she's said it a few times actually, but this time it really stuck — about how when she was growing up, her family would change plans if it was sunny outside. If the weather was nice, you adjusted and you went out, you took advantage of what the day was throwing at you.

That might sound pretty obvious, but honestly, it's not when you're from Phoenix. In Arizona, the sun is the default. It's always sunny. The question isn't "is it nice out?" — the question is "is it cool enough to go outside and survive to tell the tale?" Phoenix has months of hiding from the heat, rewarded by a few months of gorgeous weather where everyone suddenly remembers that the outdoors exist. You don't pivot for sunshine because sunshine is the permanent condition. You pivot for the rare 72-degree day in February.

New Jersey is the inverse. Winter here is the default — at least, that's how it feels when you're an Arizona native on your second year. The cold, the gray, the early dark. This winter in particular felt like it had extra innings. Working from home means the apartment is my entire world during those months. The desk, the couch, the kitchen, the desk again.

Lynds and I enjoyed what we call "cozy season" — the layers, the cuddling, the blankets on the couch while something plays on the TV — but by March I was aching for sun like a plant that someone forgot to put near a window. I couldn't get warm. My bones felt cold in a way that I didn't know bones could feel cold, and a little dubbing I've given Lynds is the "Ice Queen" since she keeps our apartment somewhere between the artic zone and the ice age, so it wasn't exactly helping matters.

When I stepped outside Saturday morning and it was actually, properly warm — with just a slight breeze, not the usual Asbury Park wind tunnel that makes you feel like you're in a weather experiment — something clicked. There had been a few teaser days before this, a warm afternoon here and there, but this one was different. This one felt like a promise, like someone finally got that groundhog and taught it a lesson.

Lynds' sunny day rule kicked in. I couldn't let wisdom like that enter my mind and not act on it. Plans had to change and, so, they changed.

The Library, The Magazines, The Boardwalk

We walked from our place to the Asbury Park Library which is just a short hop skip and a jump from our place. I just wrote about recently, so I won't go on a whole tangent about how much I love this library, but I will say that Lynds went in with a specific mission: free magazines for her vision board. She came out with a random armful of health and home magazines — and a couple Men's Health issues, which I'm choosing to interpret as aspirational material for me (I didn't ask, I don't want to know).

Her vision board isn't a resolution thing or a birthday thing — it's more of a life thing. Clipping images and words that represent the direction you want to go. I think there's something to it, especially when you're staring down a season of change, and I love that she loves planning and dreaming and manifesting things. Plus, how neat that the library has free magazines, right? You'd be surprised at how difficult they are to find, especially for free.

From the library we walked down to the boardwalk, and this is where the day shifted from "nice walk" to "thank goodness we got out of the house"

Everyone Had the Same Idea

The boardwalk was alive. Not summer-packed — it was mid-April — but alive in that specific early-spring way where everyone seems to have gotten the same memo at the same time. It's nice. Get out there.

Couples walking — young couples, old couples, I love that contrast on the boardwalk, the 25-year-olds holding hands and the 75-year-olds holding hands and the only difference is the pace. Families with kids running ahead. Dogs — so many dogs, all of them having the best day of their lives because dogs have the best day of their lives every day, but especially when there's a boardwalk and lots of people involved.

We walked through Convention Hall, which is one of my favorite parts of walking the Asbury boardwalk. I love the open architecture of that building — there's this strange, wonderful feeling of walking through something historical that's been filled with modern shops. Like the bones of the building remember being something grander, and they're just politely tolerating the retail. I've always wanted to go upstairs and through the back doors, sneak into Paramount Theater and see what's hidden beyond the main thruway. One day perhaps I will.

Down around 4th Avenue beach, there was some kind of organized run finishing up — runners crossing a line, people cheering, that particular energy of strangers clapping for other strangers who just did something hard. We didn't know what the run was for, but we stopped and watched for a minute because that kind of thing is hard to walk past without smiling and joining in with "Go Janet, you got this girl!"

All the effort made me want to celebrate for them... with a beer. I mean, I love exercise and exertion, I'm not belittling or trying to be cheeky, it just felt like time to cheers and that libations were in store.

The Michelada Situation

We ended up at Mutiny Beach — which used to be The Seahorse, for anyone keeping track of Asbury's ever-rotating restaurant scene — and grabbed a spot at the bar. Lynds and I almost always sit at the bar when it's an option. Booths and tables are fine, but there's something about bar seating that fits us better. You can talk easier, you're closer together, and I like chatting with the bartender here and there.

The food was fine — just a sandwich, nothing to write home about — but the drink is what gets me, because ordering my drink of choice outside of the Southwest is a whole thing.

I love Micheladas. For the uninitiated: it's a Mexican beer served in a glass with a salted rim and some combination of tomato juice, hot sauce, lime, and spices. In Phoenix, you say "Michelada" and the bartender nods and you're drinking one in no time. In New Jersey, you say "Michelada" and you might get a blank stare, a head tilt, or — if you're lucky — someone who's been to Tucson once.

So I've developed a system. I don't even try the word anymore (helps quell the wife's eye roll too). I go straight to the component build: "Can I do a Mexican beer on draft, and can I get a glass with a salted rim and a splash of Bloody Mary mix in it?" It feels extra, but I'm ok with it.

This works probably 70% of the time. The experienced bartenders get it immediately — and once in a while someone will even say "oh, a Michelada?" and ask if I want ice (I don't, but I appreciate that they know the variation exists). That moment of recognition is weirdly validating, like finding someone who speaks your language in a foreign country.

The other 30% of the time, you can see the confusion forming in real time. There's a processing delay. The gears are turning. And once — this is a real thing that happened — a bartender brought me a glass, a shot glass of salt, and another shot glass with Bloody Mary mix in it. Just the raw materials. Assembly required. I was my own mini bartender, building my drink at the bar like it was a craft project.

Lynds finds the whole ritual oddly endearing. When we first moved to Jersey and I was still workshopping my ordering strategy, she'd watch me fumble through it and then step in to save the bartender (not me — the bartender) from my increasingly unclear instructions. I've gotten it down to a science now, but she still gives me the look every time I start the order. It's a whole thing with us, which makes sense seeing as how I literally ordered us In-N-Out once by saying "I'll have a hamburger, and she will too, and how about a fry for the each of us?" causing utter confusion and to which I have never lived down.

At Mutiny it went smooth. Modelo, salted rim, splash of Bloody Mary. No confusion, no assembly kit. The bartender was a noob to my ask and caused a bit of a volcano (beer and salt can react if ya didn't know), so it was a small victory.

The Puppy Who Remembered Me

After lunch we walked the beach from 8th to 7th aves, took our shoes off, and sat in the sand. Oh how I missed that this winter.

Waves, sun, sand, the sounds of the beach, especially when it's not crowded, it's grounding. Lynds and I can talk about everything and nothing for hours — we're wired that way, where a conversation can start at what we're having for dinner and end at whether consciousness is a spectrum or a threshold, and neither of us remembers how we got there.

This is the part that would be unremarkable to describe and extraordinary to experience:

We were sitting there, just taking it in, when a puppy appeared out of nowhere and jumped directly into my lap.

Now — I'm a dog person, so a random puppy jumping in my lap on the beach is already a top-five moment in any given day, but this wasn't a random puppy. I recognized him immediately. It was the same American Bull Terrier puppy I'd met at a TrueRest Float Spa Lynds and I had gone to a couple weeks prior — our first time floating since 2017 when we used to go to the TrueRest location in Phoenix.

Floating is one of those things I always forget I love until I do it again — meditative, quiet, your skin feels incredible after — and we'd been saying for years we should go back. Nine years passed (as it does). But we finally went, and the owner, Scott, had his dogs hanging out in the lobby. One of them was this little Bull Terrier puppy who climbed into my lap while I filled out paperwork and just... stayed there. Belly up, fully committed. I was petting this dog for a solid ten minutes while Lynds and I handled the admin side of relaxation.

So, when that same puppy launched himself into my lap on the beach, I knew. I looked up expecting to see Scott, and there he was. He recognized us too, and we chatted for a few minutes — the weather, the beach, the usual pleasant small talk between people who've met exactly once but share a dog-mediated bond. The puppy was doing his thing in my lap again like no time had passed.

Maybe he remembered me. Maybe he's just a puppy who jumps into every available lap (probable). Either way, I'm choosing to believe we have a connection. Don't take this from me tho.

Sitting Still

After Scott and the puppy moved on, Lynds and I sat in the sand for a while longer. No agenda, no timeline, just watching waves do what waves do.

I think about time a lot lately. This is our second winter in New Jersey — which means it's been almost two years since we left Arizona, which still feels both like a lifetime ago and about three weeks ago. Lynds is turning 40 at the end of this month. We're about to fly back to Arizona for her birthday, then to London and Spain in June — trips we booked through a travel agent, which is a whole other story — and it's wild to me how quickly the calendar fills with things that feel both far away and imminent.

Spring has a way of accelerating time. Winter is long and slow and samey — especially when your apartment is your office — and then one Saturday you step outside and the world has changed. Trees that were bare and skeletal two weeks ago suddenly have leaves. Flowers are pushing through dirt. People are outside, and not in the "walking quickly with their head down" winter way, but in the "lingering, looking around, sitting on benches" spring way.

There's new life everywhere, literally. And sitting on that beach watching waves, I felt it — the awareness that you're in a moment. Not remembering it or anticipating it, just being in it. That's a hard thing to hold onto. It's like trying to look directly at a star — it's clearer in your peripheral vision than when you stare right at it.

The Plan Can Wait

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: I had a plan for Saturday. A good plan. A productive plan. The kind of plan that would've resulted in tangible progress on a project I care about. I ditched it because the sun was out and my wife was still in bed and my pug sounded like a chainsaw on a Tuesday morning.

I don't regret it for a second.

I think we — and I'm mostly talking to myself here — get so locked into the plan that we forget the plan is supposed to serve the life, not the other way around. I work from home. I work on personal projects in my off hours. I'm always building something, tinkering with something, redesigning something. That's part of who I am, and I like that about myself. But there's a version of that where the work becomes the default and the living becomes the exception, and that's backwards.

Lynds' sunny day rule is a corrective for that. If it's nice, go outside. The work will be there tomorrow. The day won't.

The Book Bros redesign is still sitting in my Figma file, right where I left it Friday night. It was still there Monday. It'll be there next weekend. The mobile-first layouts aren't going anywhere. But that Saturday — the library, the boardwalk, the Michelada, the puppy, the sand, the waves, my wife next to me talking about everything and nothing — that was a one-time showing. No rain checks, no replays.

We got home around 5, sun-tired in the best possible way, and made a charcuterie board of Sardinian foods for dinner.

Kevin was thrilled to see us, as if we'd been gone for six weeks and not four hours. Pugs have no sense of time, only a sense of injustice.

Seasons Change, Plans Change

I'm not going to wrap this up with some grand thesis about mindfulness or work-life balance, because that would be ironic coming from a guy who was fully prepared to spend a gorgeous Saturday staring at Figma components.

What I will say is this: I'm learning that life out here has a rhythm I didn't grow up with. In Arizona, the seasons blur. It's hot, it's less hot, it's perfect for two months, it's hot again. There's not a lot of contrast. New Jersey — for all the winters that make me feel like my skeleton is frozen — has contrast in abundance. And contrast makes you notice things. The first warm day after a long winter means something. It's not just nice weather. It's permission.

Permission to change the plan. Permission to walk slow. Permission to sit in sand and talk about nothing and pet a puppy you met at a float spa two weeks ago and order a drink that confuses bartenders and come home and eat sardines on a board and call it a perfect day.

Lynds is turning 40. We're heading back to Arizona, then to Europe. Another year is clicking forward. And I'm sitting here writing about a Saturday that wasn't supposed to be anything special, and it turned out to be the best day I've had in months.

Sometimes the forecast is better than the to-do list. Trust the forecast.

Kevin was asleep on the couch by 6. He'd had a very hard day of waiting.