Lazy Sunday

This morning I dragged myself out of bed to go to church. What with it being the Christmas season, I felt like I needed to make an extra effort, especially since I've been bad about attending all year. (I blame my failure to get to the services in part on the sleeping problems I've had for most of the year, but maybe that's simply a way of justifying it.) I expected to see a snow-covered parking lot, but nope, all we were getting was rain.

About midway through the service the rain changed to snow. It was coming down steadily when I carefully made my way to the car across the quickly becoming slick pavement and asphalt. As I drove to my next destination--the movie theater--I got stuck behind someone driving about 10 miles per hour. I'm all for being careful, but the roads were totally clean. Plus, not that many vehicles were on the streets yet.

By the time my showing of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader had ended--the film was tedious, by the way--the car required a decent excavating. With it being around 12:30, traffic was heavy and slow-moving on the snowy streets. Not that I had plans to go anywhere else, but this sealed the choice to hole up at home for the day.

Watching football and napping, with an emphasis on the latter, gobbled up the majority of the day. It is one of the pleasures of living in a cold weather state during winter that watching sports all day long on the weekend isn't something to feel ashamed about doing. I imagine it's harder to justify doing this when the weather outside is hospitable.

The TV remained on to watch the season finale of The Amazing Race. The global game show is easily the pinnacle of reality TV fare, and it's the one program of these I'd be interested to appear on. While it must be exhausting to run around the world and be thrown into stressful situations, how else could one get the quantity of experiences and passport stamps that the participants get while doing it on someone else's dime?

The Amazing Race is certainly molded as much as any reality TV show, but I appreciate that its intent isn't to show people at their worst. Sure, sometimes the contestants display cultural insensitivity and tempers flare. For the most part, though, this is a relationship program in the form of a game show travelogue, and those partners who remain patient and good-humored tend to perform better. (I think the producers learned a lesson several seasons ago when they cast a couple in which the husband seemed verbally abusive. People will get testy under the circumstances, but that extreme kind of reaction has virtually vanished.)

The snow has returned, I think, and is to continue to some degree through the night. And that was Sunday.