Breaking Into Breaking Bad

Marley got an offer to go to Las Vegas this past weekend with my brother. It meant missing most of her classes at school on Friday and missing her soccer game on Saturday. Usually this would have meant an immediate no. School is too important and we have made a commitment to her soccer team to be there every weekend. But then I realized that Chandler would also be out of town as he was going up to northern California for a cross country meet. If we said yes to Vegas then Dave and I would have a kid-free weekend. At home. And we haven’t had that in a very long time.

Visions of pre-kid weekends danced in my head. Sleeping late. Going out to breakfast. Lounging around and being lazy. Reading. Doing nothing. Maybe we could go out to dinner. Or take a walk on the beach. Sure there was some house cleaning and grocery shopping. But there were no sports. No chauffeuring kids to various places. Just us. Doing less.

“What do you want to do this weekend?” I asked Dave having a pretty good idea of exactly what it was he’d want to do all weekend with no kids.

It turns out I was wrong. And his answer kind of shocked me.

“Well,” he said. “The one show I’ve always regretted not watching is Breaking Bad because everyone always talks about how good it is. AMC started a marathon of all five season on Wednesday and I started recording them. I thought maybe we could do a little binge watching this weekend.”

“You want to watch five seasons worth of Breaking Bad in one weekend?”

“I don’t think we can get through all five seasons, but we could probably power through at least 10 or 12 hours. What do you say? Are you in?”

How could I say no to such a romantic offer? Sitting on the couch side by side, each with our own bowl of popcorn and a cozy blanket thrown over us with the curtains drawn to block out the sunlight of the gorgeous weekend to watch the lovable Walter White use his mad chemistry skills to cook the purest crystal meth anyone has ever seen. (And you know maybe violently kill a few people and blow some shit up along the way.)

Nothing like a little binge TV.

I don’t know if it will be possible to avoid all the spoiler alerts that are sure to be all over the media this week after last night’s final episode. I’ll obviously have to keep off of Facebook and Twitter. And keep my radio turned off. No local morning news. It’s probably not practical for me to go through my daily activities this week covering my ears while saying, “La la la la la.” So I suspect I will inadvertently find out what happens to dear Walter and his family. (Just like I did with Downton Abbey’s Sybil when we binge watched that.)

We did actually have some plans this weekend so are only about eight or nine episodes in – just at the beginning of Season Two. There are 59 episodes left in our DVR queue. If we watch an episode a day we’ll be done in two months, but we have busy kid-filled lives so I don’t think that’s very likely.

We might have to send the kids away again.