Went fishing yesterday. My brother-in-law and I both caught a striper (that's a striped bass, if you're not the fishing type, the most prized quarry for saltwater anglers in New England), but neither was large enough to keep. Still, we have ourselves an old fishing hole along Rumney Marsh, an improbable wetland oasis less than fifteen miles away from downtown Boston. Every time we've fished along the Pines river, we've caught something. Maybe one of these times it'll be a "keepah"!

Back to Saturday. In a desperate bid to escape both the sweltering heat and neighborhood BBQ party downstairs, the missus and I piled into the car and drove. We live a few short miles away from Cape Anne, and the coastal drive afforded by Route 127, which skirts the Cape in an at-times heart-achingly scenic loop, is always a good way to while away an afternoon. Even if you're not from the area, you likely have heard of Cape Anne's most famous (or infamous) town, the fishing port of Gloucester, thanks to Sebastian Junger. His book, The Perfect Storm - later turned into a surprisingly reverent Hollywood blockbuster movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg - is a chronicle of the deadly and destructive Halloween Storm of October 1991 that devastated Massachusetts' commercial fishing fleet and lead to the loss of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat, her captain Billy Tyne, and all of her crew. That celebrated disaster still packs in morbidly curious tourists, but there's so much more to Gloucester, whose unique natural beauty has attracted artists (such as luminist painter Fitz Hugh Lane), since the 1800's. When we were driving through, there was a streetside arts and crafts show along the seawall, so we stretched our legs, ate some kettle corn, and drank some lemonade while browsing the stalls. Dinner we ate downtown, at a hole-in-the-wall establishment called Jalapeno's that served some amazingly authentic (and tasty!) Mexican food. Maria had the carne asada, I tried the chicken mole enchiladas, and we both split an order of calamari fried in corn flour with pickled jalepeno slices and a chipotle-spiked mariana sauce on the side. Heavenly! We topped off our day in the air-conditioned car with a night at the also air-conditioned movies. XXX, starring Vin Diesel, is actually good, if you like that rock 'em sock 'em sort of spy thriller that the James Bond franchise used to be. But here was the best part: waiting for the movie to start, we stepped outside of the theater and were treated to a full-bore fireworks show going on out over Revere Beach. How's that for a serendipitous ending?