DAYBREAK On Sundays I sleep late. I get up about a quarter to 6 — even earlier if I’m in the throes of writing something.

JOLTIN’ JOE I make strong coffee. My wife is also an early riser, but not as early. We have coffee. We don’t eat breakfast. Normally during the week we get five newspapers. On Sundays we get The Times and the tabloids.

THE NET I’ll often play tennis. We have various people we play with, writers and whatever. I prefer singles, ‘cause it’s more exercise.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

LUNCHTIME If we have guests I’ll stop at the market or Citarella and buy mozzarella cheese and some cold cuts. Or the muskmelons in August out there are just unbelievably sweet, so we’ll just make melons and cottage cheese for lunch. And we’ll often sit outside by the pool reading either work or books. We never go out to lunch. My wife would divorce me if I said, let’s go to lunch every day.

THE GAME I’m tinkering now with the Artists and Writers stuff. You have several objectives that can clash with each other. On the one hand, you’re trying to win. On the other hand, you’re trying to get as many players into the game as possible. The roster is over 40 people that signed up, and that’s a lot of people to get into a nine-inning game. Particularly since some of those players are not particularly good players, and that clashes with your objective of trying to win. And the third objective, which can also clash with that first objective, is that you’re trying to get as many celebrated people into the lineup in order to entertain the fans who pay money to attend the game, in order to maximize the amount of money you raise for charity. So it leads to some hilarity.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

THE PLEAS I will get e-mails from people that I don’t know telling me what wonderful softball players they are. Now anyone who tells you they’re a wonderful softball player usually is not. And what I always tell them to do is come early to practice before the game. And I watch them bat and field. And the other hilarity for the captain is that you stand among players on the sideline, and they’re looking at you as, “When can I get in the game?” It’s really kind of a pain.

THE PLAYER I used to play the outfield, but as you get older you slow and you move to safe positions like first base, which is where I play now.

HEADING HOME And then, typically on Sundays we drive back. I cook. I’m the person who likes to cook in the household. It could be anything, like a recipe I spotted in Greece a couple years ago which we call Greek chicken.

OPTIONS If our family did not join us for the weekend, we visit them on the Upper West Side, bring a bottle of wine, and order in. Or, on a really nice day we stay for an early dinner, barbecue fish or chicken, shuck some corn, make a tomato salad, and drive back to the city around 7:30 p.m.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

CATCHING UP And then we’ll always watch something we DVR’d on TV during the week. Sometimes we have a tough time staying up past 10, so we’ll DVR “Mad Men” or “Homeland” and watch them a day or two later. We were totally fixated by a Danish show called “Borgen,” about a Danish prime minister.

BEDTIME, NO READING And then beddie-bye. Certainly by 11, because we get up early. I don’t read before bed, but I read a lot during the day. If I lie in bed and take out something to read, I’ll last two pages. I find I can’t read lying down. It’s like a sleeping pill for me.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/nyregion/strong-coffee-weak-hitters.html?partner=rss&emc=rss