Our trip to the Hamptons a couple of weeks ago started out pretty ominously. My roommate (who prefers that I refer to him as my landlord), Jack, and I met our friend Jeff at his new apartment in Queens that has one of those old-style elevators where you have to close an outer door before the door inside the elevator will close. So we loaded our suitcases full of clothes, duffel bags full of liquor, backpacks full of Xboxes, and arms full of cameras into this 2-by-3-foot thing, let the outer door close behind us, pressed the button to go down, watch as the inner door slid closed . . . and just sat there.

It took Jeff about three seconds to silently flip out and then press every button, ring the emergency bell, and begin calling the super repeatedly. After about five seconds of that, I started looking around to figure out if any fresh air was getting into the thing while Jack, I’m sure, was contemplating which of us would be more delicious to eat if it came down to that: the kid raised on Caribbean food or the kid raised on steak and potatoes.

Eventually, Jeff and Jack pried open the inner door and figured out that the outer door just hadn’t closed all the way. So after stopping on every floor thanks to Jeff’s button-pushing, we were on our way to the loveliest dollhouse on the East coast:

It was dark by the time we got there, so we spent the first night hanging out inside, but as soon as the sun rose (okay, more like 11 a.m.), we were out the door for some lemon ricotta pancakes and some buttermilk pancakes with crispy bacon:

As soon as we got back to the house, I walked across the street to the beach. Now, I hadn’t expected the water to actually be warm enough to swim in, but I hadn’t expected the crazy waves. These things had to be eight feet high:

and green!:

and coming so far up the shore in some places that they were making separate pools and cutting out big sand cliffs:

I understood why some of the houses had boards on them still from the hurricane weeks before. And I hope you’re not bored yet, because here are 15 million more pictures of them:

butterfly!

closer butterfly!

Jeff and Jack drove by the beach to pick me up so we could meet everyone at the grocery store to stock the house for the weekend. I found this greeting card resting on the pizza I was about to buy, and it actually did dissuade me from buying that pizza. But not the one next to it. BOO-YAH.

Our friends Anthony and Chantee arrived that night, and we spent the evening eating Anthony’s cheeses on bread drizzled with honey and solving world problems.

The next day, we went on a loooooooong walk on the beach that included so much propping-Anthony’s-camera-up-on-flip-flops-and-things-to-take-pictures-of-ourselves and then went into “town”, which is a five-block strip of boutiques (that all sell ice cream in addition to whatever their actual purpose is) and restaurants on one street. We took uproarious photos that are all trapped on Anthony’s camera and stopped by a bakery where I got something so delicious it’s getting its own post on donuts4dinner.com. Just knowing that it’s in one of the bags in front of Jack and Anthony is kind of making me mouth-froth right now:

While everyone else sat out on the deck reading, I got up the nerve to stick my feet in the pool for, like, a whole half an hour before they turned blue. Then, that night, we had a family dinner at the house and then drove to the end of the peninsula to see this:

And all the joy we felt can be expressed in this picture of Chantee and me:

It’s just so great there, you guys. The house is three stories of plushy couches and TVs and stereo systems, so there’s always something going on somewhere, and everyone gets along when I’m not accusing someone of having bad taste in music, and everyone stays up so late talking about so much, and we walk to the beach in sweaters at midnight, and we stand out on the balcony and look at the moon and are perfect.