It’s 7:30 Monday morning, and Lake Winnipesaukee is shimmering. Despite patches of blue sky, the sun is still looking for a hole in the clouds. The birds are chirping, but not so loudly that it would wake up anybody who’s not already stirring.

A few minutes ago, a speedboat slashed across the neck of the lake that forms Alton Bay. The ripples worked their way toward the shore just below my room in the Bay Side Inn, my favorite pit stop during the Nextel Cup season.

Now they’ve smoothed out. There’s not enough of a breeze to jostle the maple trees that stick over the water from the bank under my balcony, but there’s enough going out on the water to create a pattern that can be hypnotizing if you stare long enough.

It’s nice here.

It’s also nice that, for a change, nothing happened in Sunday’s Nextel Cup race that was so compelling that I can’t just ponder the start of a new day instead of jumping right into some major controversy.

NASCAR needed the Siemens 300. No, it wasn’t the most thrilling race in history. Only three drivers led the race and one, Jimmy Spencer, did so for only a token three laps by staying out on a yellow.

Ryan Newman started from the pole and led the first 170 laps. Kurt Busch started 31st and caught up. He led for a while, fell behind Newman on a pit stop, then got the lead back and won. Jeff Gordon got around Newman and finished second. Matt Kenseth and Tony Stewart battled for fourth, with Kenseth winning. Dale Earnhardt Jr. drove 61 laps and got out of his car because of his burned legs and Martin Truex Jr. finished up.

All in all, it was routine. Some folks did smack the wall pretty hard, but nobody got hurt. If you would have glued on tissue paper and put beauty queens in the cars, it might have been an excellent parade.

The Earnhardt Jr. story will linger as we see if he’ll go the distance at Pocono.

Under the old championship format, the points damage that Sunday’s 31st-place finish did would be the follow-up story. Jimmie Johnson could have started playing defense to protect what’s now a 165-point lead on his way to what could have become a relatively easy path to his first Cup title.

But with the “Chase for the Nextel Cup” in place, the racing that’s going to win anybody a championship lies over the horizon in the year’s final 10 races. There are seven races before we get there.

No fights. No obvious NASCAR rules or officiating missteps. No name-calling. Given everything that has gone on so far this year, and with the seven-race run-up to the championship cut comes at Richmond in September, it was nice to have a relatively calm, quiet weekend.

Oh, look. The sun’s finally out. And there goes another speedboat.