Kayaking trip, etc.

So I just finished reading "Ammonite" by Nicola Griffith (as recommended by Hannah, of course), and my reality is still cloudy with dream-influences from that book. So here's the dirt on my cloudy reality. My memory being bad, and my problem with the blending of reality and fiction, means that you shouldn't really take me up on this as reality as how you might witness the same events.

The kayaking trip. The waves were gentle swells and the sky was breaking into robin's egg instead of royal blue. The sand was already warm, the water felt like stepping into wet air, and the beach was swarming with tourists before noon. The slim, half-moon, banana kayak bobbed in the water like the crab trap floater-buoys, or the soft-haired head of a drowned young boy. Soaring along the crests of the waves, sliding down again or falling and careening off their edges to create an explosion of sea-water along the bow and back out to sea through the scupper holes. Reaching the middle of the sandbar, we steadied the boat as best we could. I jumped with one knee up, keeping low, turned and slid the rest of the way into my seat in the front. I grabbed both paddles as Hannah jumped and landed on her stomach and clambered her way into the back seat. I handed her a paddle. Logo upright on the left is how you know it's situated correctly in your two hands. The waves coming at us from the front, the beach behind us--cluttered with tourists like so many pieces of trash on the streets of New York--we both set a pace. Using shoulders and arms and core, I dipped one blade kind of sideways and pushed back, then the next, trying not to lean, only to bend, to keep a steady rhythm in time with the waves and the earth beneath the toss of saline water.

We did see birds. Egrets, with their fuzzy white heads, standing still among the reeds, dipping their curved necks, black beetle eyes closed, into the shallow water and through to the sand to search for tiny creatures to crunch in its slim beak; grey herons with their salmon-pink necks and bluish feathers standing among the mangrove trees looking weary; sand-pipers making shrill sounds I'd never heard come from them before, in doubles leading us away from nests, the black strips on the bottoms of their wings revealed as they circled with panicked calls; an osprey, concentratedly surveying the water, swooping at the sight of a fish, and swerving back up after realizing that it was only a glittering shell lying still and dead at the bottom of the shallow inlet; a few other species we didn't recognize, gull and sand-piper and skimmer variants in the shallows all together. The bird preserve on the other side of shell island.

Sometime, we will once again paddle to Fort de Soto, and break at one of their campsites for the day to eat lunch and replenish our water supplies. But the birds were enough for this trip. My arms and shoulders and even my legs have been aching and spasming and cramping for these days after the trip, my justification for the skip-days. But tomorrow, maybe, we'll head out again.

Today, we ventured out to the water a half-hour before sunset. The water was darker then, the waves blown sideways. The moon, gibbous, shining bright even in the pale blue setting sky-light, and I thought maybe it was pulling the current sideways, tricking it into going the opposite way of the waves, which the wind blew towards shore. The sand and the air were cooler than the water, and the sun glowed nuclear-like as it moved towards the horizon. We danced and twisted in the ocean like children, like sand-beasts re-learning how to live in the water out of which their ancestors emerged, until the sun sank slow beneath the sea and the sky turned dark. It was shiver weather on the way home, with high wind and a chill breeze.

Inside the house, the branches scraping like fingernails against the window panes convinced me that there was someone in the dark, a shape of black, an emptiness, watching me, waiting to suck me into the void. Music is the cure for that emptiness. We deny death by drowning it with sound, but it is coming for us all. Someday. But in the meantime, we will dance in the sun and the moon and listen to music and bake cookies and wait.

...skip day...

Some days exist and some don't. Or, at least, in my random reality that how I think of things. There's the days that exist and the days that are "skipped" -- and that's the beauty of our time here in florida.

Two days ago we took the trolley to the grocery store. After our discovery of the crack-laced ice cream at the ice cream store, we finally decided to do something about it: namely, buy some ice cream at the Publix. We walked in with the plan of buying a thing of ice, and putting the ice cream together with the ice so that we could get it home without it melting to ooky ice cream dribble. But we did a once-over of the dollar store, and found a little disposable-type cooler for a mere buck -- perfect! Emi was able to fit the entire cooler into her backpack, and we put two half-gallons of ice cream (mint chocolate chip for Emi, chocolate-chip cookie dough for me) plus two pounds of fish into that thing, and got everything back safely. And, the best discovery was that, since we both have student ID's, we don't have to pay as much money for the trolley! Quite the day all in all.

Then, yesterday, we were supposed to go kayaking again, but I convinced Emi that I needed to not kayak but instead do Shakespeare-related work (silly work), and that then we'd do a longer kayaking trip on a different day. Good plan, huh? I got some work done, but we spend half the day playing silly video games and being silly in general. And we scooped our own ice cream cones and wandered to the beach for sunset.

And then, today, Emi set her alarm for the much-too-early time of 8am, and we scurried through our morning (I'm being sarcastic here) and put the kayak in the water shortly before 10. We took a leisurely trip south through the islands, and then came back on the gulf side of Shell Island. It was amazing: we saw a ton of amazing birds, and had 12- to 18-inch fish jumping all around us half the trip. We got back around 2pm, sunburned and happy. And I have yet to do any work whatsoever. Oy.

It feels like the last many days have flown by without doing anything "useful." Which, in some reality, I'm sure that a day without producing anything useful is a "wasted" day -- a skip day. I'm not sure which one of our days was a "skip day" -- perhaps all of them? But I can say for sure that I plan on skipping days as often as possible.

there's crack in the ice cream!

So there's this ice cream store on the corner of 8th street in lovely Pass-a-Grille. We love the ice cream store. Why? Because they have ice cream. Like, duh.

We started our evening walk tonight much too early -- nearly an hour before sunset -- because we were both dreaming of eating ice cream and watching the sun set. Because it's what we like to do. There's a beautiful symmetry to it, somehow. Peaceful, despite the hordes of other people out doing the exact same thing at exactly the same time.

Tonight, as we approach the ice cream store we see a horrific sight: a fire truck and an ambulance sitting out front. Talk about a scary sight! I mean, what if all the ice cream was on fire, melting to icky ice cream mush? Tragic, that's what it'd be.

Luckily, the ice cream store was fine, and the ice cream was unmelted. Whew! Just an elderly woman rushed to the hospital, nothing to worry our little heads over.

We walked out to the wall where there are a bunch of seats and sat down with our ice creams. Then along came an old woman with two white puff-ball dogs, and a little kid that didn't want to sit next to us. It was all quite funny that, when his uncle said, "let's sit here" the kid ran past us at high speed yelling, "nooooooooooooo!" until the kid's dad walked by carrying all the kid's toys from their day at the beach. I nodded hello and smiled, and that jerk gave us a look...good thing it's florida, because otherwise we'd have frozen, literally, with that cold glare. He went on to join his son at a different bench further away, and we decided it would probably be best to move on to a different place on the beach -- didn't want to suffer permanent frostbite damage or anything.

We walked quite a ways along the beach -- did I mention that we went out to watch the sunset much too early? And, probably because of that jerk, we noticed the disgusted (and a few disgusting, mostly from icky-gross-men) looks of so many of the people we passed.

So we got back home and sat down, not sure if the beauty of the deeply-red sunset, the sea-foam that looked purple in the sky's reflection, and the skimming sea-bird were worth the looks. On the couch, Emi says, "Is it bad if I want more ice cream?" And that's it -- it's for sure. They're lacing the ice cream with something addictive at that crazy ice cream store. Probably crack. Probably that's why that lady had to get taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

After the overall sunset-beach-walking experience, Emi decided that we should never time our sunset-watching so poorly: from now on we'll have to wait at home until right before the sunset, run out to watch it, then run back.

But don't worry, we won't neglect the ice cream.

Water water everywhere

Monday morning dawned cloudy and dark. I wasn't there to see it, but Emi woke up...and bugged me to get up. No way, I said, as I pulled the blankets over my head. At 7am, she walks back in the bedroom and announces that the Seahorse won't open until 8pm. I think I muttered something evil into my pillow and closed my eyes tight. Emi flopped down into bed to wait out the next hour...and promptly fell back to sleep.

As we both slept, the thunderstorm came to a head: thunder and lightning and sheets upon sheets of rain. I dreamt I was in the middle of the ocean, rocking back and forth peacefully, watching the lightning peacefully strike around me...Emi apparently dreamed she was drowning. Go figure.

We woke up finally about 8:30, after the thunder finally rumbled into the distance, and headed to the Seahorse. And, less than half-way there, the downpour started again. So we ran, me faster than you'd expect a fat girl to run, Emi leaping over puddles in her flip-flops. We sat in the diner and drank bad coffee and waited for the storm to pass...but it didn't. It just kept raining. It'd slack off for a few minutes, then pick up stronger than ever. Finally, Emi couldn't sit still for even a second longer, and we decided to run for it...again. By this point, all of the storm drains were clogged, and puddles had formed that came up to my ankle -- as I quickly discovered. By the time we ran through the front door, we were both soaked.

So we waited. No milk or eggs or cheese in the house, and it's storming too hard to go to the grocery store.

Then, almost magically, it began to clear up. We headed to the trolley stop, and before you know it there we were at the Publix. Emi bought two dresses, and we bought a ton of groceries...at least, it felt like a ton as we lugged them all to the trolley stop just in time to miss a trolley. So we sat in the uber-humid air with our milk getting warm, slapping ants off our feet and chatting with a local as we waited for a half-hour for the next one.

After all the rain in the morning, you'd think we would have had enough of water...but no way. Absolutely not! Never enough! Time to go swimming.

Which was beautiful, of course. Lots of waves still from the storm, and stormclouds still in the east, but that made it all the more beautiful.

And then this morning we went kayaking. After a bagel and coffee, we headed out to the gulf and paddled down to the Don and back. Lots of waves still, but nothing we couldn't handle. Don't we sound tough? There was lots of seaweed loose in the waves, probably brought up from the storm. We also saw a dolphin, but it didn't come close enough to play with us.

It was only 11am, but I was starving, and practically fell over myself to make a tuna sandwich and subsequently inhale it. Then, this afternoon, we went swimming again.

There are more thunderstorms in the forecast, which means more rain, the big-dropped type rain where the sky dumps the ocean on the land.

I'm looking forward to it.

Gaga

Telephone

Early thoughts

Dark morning, no sunrise in sight. I sat on cool stone tiles, wet from the remnants of the threatening storm, dotted with dampening pearls. Dragonfly poised so still on the edge of a frangipani leaf.

...and the Seahorse doesn't open until 8am, so why am I wide awake and hungry?

New life

I wanted to add the smaller bits of today, and the gardening that I enjoyed while Hannah was napping...

We were starving after we finally got off the bloody Supershuttle, and went in search of noms somewhere on the beach... riding the trolley to Publix to find food was not an option. First, we tried the ever-so-lovable Seaside, but I'd forgotten the evil name change (Paradise Grill WTF?), new management, and price hike ($7 for an effing sandwhich? This is not Manhattan, people). We ordered, and paid, and waited. They were out of root beer, so of course, I got coke. The coke that came had a strand of the cashier girl's long, orange hair in it. I picked it out and me and Hannah just looked at each other. Then there came the announcement that they didn't have garden burgers. So there we were, baking in the hot sun, starving half to death, and sleep-deprived, and they're out of garden burgers. Basically, Hannah went into bitch-them-out mode and demanded our money back. And boy did we get it back. Then we took our business elsewhere. And by elsewhere, I mean the Hurricane. I ordered a grilled salmon sandwich with fries and a root beer. Let me say: BEST MEAL OF MY LIFE. If only because I was starving. I still have a small piece of leftovers in the fridge that I'm eating for lunch tomorrow. Oh, the good life

I gardened while Hannah napped. This involved standing under the broad expanse of stormy sky, watching the gathering clouds twist and darken, as I got out tools. I swept the sidewalk of the dead blooms, trimmed multiple plants that were in the way, and began to process of taking out my giant agave plant that just died in the freeze. Fire ants have moved into his corpse, and so I just hacked off a few of the leaves looking for any babies that he had sheltered. I found two babies, and a ton of little spores from the giant offspring shoot he sent out just before he died. I'm gonna dig him the rest of the way out and re-plant the babies tomorrow. Hopefully, after shopping, we'll go swimming. I can't wait to get in the water.

Breakfast at the Seahorse tomorrow. Whatever shall we do with leisure time in sunny Florida where there are supposed to be random thunderstorms, blazing sun, and 80 degree weather all week?

All about a Cab

So it started today with a cab. Or, rather, not a cab -- I ordered it last night, but at 7:30 this morning...no cab. There Emi and I sit, two HUGE bags packed for Florida (and Paris, in Emi's case), two packed-to-the-gills backpacks, and a loudly-meowing cat in a tiny carrier. And no stinkin' cab. I call, but they don't take calls. So I e-mail them, knowing it's useless. Emi starts to freak (I was too, but I was working pretty hard to hide it), and so she calls another service: they say it'll take 45 minutes just for them to get to us and it'll cost $65. WHAT?!? Since she has good common sense, Emi politely told them to go to hell. And we head out, with all our crap, to lug everything up the many stairs to the train station. We get five steps...and we see a black car with a car service logo: it's our cab! It's finally our missing cab! The poor guy lifts my 77lb bag into the trunk (along with everything else), we hop into the back, and Ginger serenades us with tortured meows the entire way to JFK airport.

Life is wonderful. We get to the airport...and then they weigh our bags. And, yup, I'm at 77lbs. Emi's kind enough to let me load a few pounds of books into her bag, and we head over to the dreaded security line...with Ginger. At this point, I'm freaking -- last time I went through security with my cat, it was an ordeal. And that was Portland Oregon...nothing like the chaos of JFK. Of course I shouldn't have worried: Emi calmly pulls Ginger out of the carrier (Ginger was far from calm -- she tried to take the carrier bottom with her by force), and waltzes through security as if it's a walk in the damn park.

Through a late cab and security with a pet in tow, we got to our gate....TWO HOURS EARLY. Must be time for hot chocolate and coffee. :)

The flight itself was uneventful (thank goodness!). Not even any jokes from the cockpit. Emi did eat blue potato chips, and since when are blue potato chips the norm? I'm from the dark ages, I swear.

We grabbed a Super Shuttle (which Emi had the foresight to reserve), and then we got the grand tour of Saint Petersburg: never have I seen such a combination of golf courses, run-down single-level homes, random jungle moments, and gated communities. We were the last to get dropped off. I think probably because the driver wanted to take his lunch break here. We saw the van parked near the beach when we went to go find food...so it wasn't just my crazy imagination. Really. I swear. Emi thinks all Super Shuttles look alike, but clearly she didn't see the gleam of anticipation in the eye of the driver at going to Pass-a-Grille.

Then, to kick it all off, I get a call at 6:39pm tonight...from the cab company, asking if I ordered a cab for 6:30. What? No, I say -- I ordered a cab for 7:30 THIS MORNING. Poor guy sounded a little confused and hung up. Less than a minute later I get another call, this one probably from his supervisor. I got a little snippy, and he sounded appropriately apologetic.

So how did we get a cab to the airport this morning? Still figuring that one out...talk about some seriously good luck, despite how it felt in the moment.

First Entry?

So we started this blog on a whim when I said, "Let's start a blog!" and Hannah replied, "Okay, sure."

We're not really sure what's going to happen here. Sometimes we'll post on the things that happen in our daily lives, sometimes big events, sometimes nonsense... funny stuff, sad stuff, boring stuff, etc. And we'll start during our summer trip to Florida, and end who knows where.

:)

Much love to you all,

Emi+Hannah