Day at the Beach

Took this week off to do some wandering and relaxing, as I did about this time last year. Started off the week yesterday with a trip out to Ocean Shores, WA. The last time I went there, my younger brother and sister were visiting, and the GPS led us to the middle of parking lot at the local high school, and I got one of the worst migraines I've ever had and couldn't think well enough to get us to the beach (approximately twenty feet away)(OK, slight exaggeration, but only slight) and I did a lot of getting mad at my brother and sister for expecting me to take the big sister role and be In Charge and it just wasn't my most shining moment or the best day ever.

A few driftwood logs made a nice place to stop for a picnic lunch.

Yesterday...was solitary, but relaxing. I did learn that apparently Android GPS cannot be relied upon to get to Ocean Shores. The freebie Google Maps lady dumped me repeatedly, and though I did stop once to sweet-talk her into continuing to provide guidance, she turned her back on me again a few miles down the road. Fine, be that way, see if I care. She also pronounces "Rainier" as "Rain-yay" and Port Angeles as "Port Angles," which disturbs me, especially considering she knows how to say "Puyallup." Makes me wonder if she's mispronouncing just to annoy me.

I love all the different patterns the water leaves behind on the sand!

It being a weekday and not a particularly hot day, the beach was mostly empty. Once I got a few dozen yards beyond the access point, I pretty much had the sand to myself, except for about a bazillion seagulls. I believe they must nest here--there were *scads* of them, many of which didn't look entirely mature. Made me realize I've not really seen baby seagulls. There are quite a lot of gulls in Olympia: they wander the parking lot at work sometimes in unruly mobs, or fight the unruly mobs of crows in a bizarre bird gang warfare, but they all seem to be more or less adults.

I walked quite a long way, until I was tired and highly relaxed, and then walked back. Oh, I wish I could bring that *sound* back with me! That's what gets me the most about the ocean: the sound of the surf.

When I got back to my parking spot, I stopped long enough to buy an ice cream cone at a shop by the parking area, and then headed home. I did take a quick break in Aberdeen on the way back. They have a Staples *right next* to a Goodwill there. That's just unfair. Got a nice EMI recording of Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony. I was good and didn't spend money at Staples, though I did wander the aisles a bit.

Today is my second day off, and I've accomplished considerably less. Mostly have been reading and scribbling and getting locked in pointless overanalyzing. For example, made a cup of Earl Grey tea, which I remember someone (Dad?) referring to as "perfumey," and started thinking about that word and how it really could mean just about anything considering how many types of perfume there are, and this bugged me, so I sat down to write a rant on the subject just to get it out of my system, and then I started looking up "perfumey" in various dictionaries, which were all very vague, which seems like a cop-out on the part of dictionary makers, but on the other hand, if they weren't vague, then they'd be defining "perfumey" based on their own life experience and that would be wrong.

So...yeah, it's after lunch time, and I'm just sittin' here sipping lukewarm Earl Grey. And thinking back on yesterday.

I like the way the water, land and sky all blend together here...

Darkness and Light (whole bunch of type-cast poetry)

I have a tendency to take things much too much to heart. Last Saturday afternoon, someone removed a comment I'd made on one of their Facebook posts. I can't come up with any sort of reason why, and I was too shy to ask. I was so mortified by the experience, trying to imagine what they must have *thought* I meant, that I was practically non-functional for the rest of the weekend.

Things like being removed from a friend's blogroll paralyze me, even while intellectually I know I've talked about a lot of different things over the years, and since I haven't broken things out into strictly compartmentalized blogs and I bounce around a lot (an understatement), some people will drift away. I try to figure out what it was I did that offended, and beat myself up for imagined wrong-doings. I've also found myself stat-watching, fretting over how many page-loads I get or don't get.

And all of this is just silly. If I'm taking these things so seriously, I think maybe I need to take a step back from this whole Internet thing--or at least the blogging portion thereof--for awhile, take a deep breath, get some perspective, do some writing that will only be seen by me instead of jumping up and down trying to get attention, and then half the time not knowing how to take it if I do get some. Oh, and maybe catch up on letters for once--what a concept.

I'll be back, probably sooner than I intend to be, but I'm taking a vacation, at least for a few weeks, maybe a month or so.

So...hey, if I'm gonna go out for a bit, I'll go out with a bang... First off, here are a few poems I actually wrote a number of years ago, but refrained from posting because of their darkness. I'll count these as my final two vignettes for Art of the Letter's July challenge.





And something a bit more lighthearted--a little poem I wrote back in the late 90s, when I was in Germany in the Air Force. I like this one. It makes me smile.

What I did on summer vacation

Went to the Mt. St. Helens Bluegrass Festival in Toledo, WA. I learned a new tune--or at least, how to play it on guitar: Rickett's Hornpipe. Also got to hear some great local and semi-local bands, plus one of the greatest female vocalists in bluegrass today: Dale Ann Bradley. Her band is awesome, too, especially her current mandolin player, Chris Harris. That young man is going places.

Drank many, many cups of coffee, many of them at Mud Bay Coffee. I'm still mourning being on the other side of town, though in all other ways my move was a good thing. It was nice revisiting some, and I have plenty of their coffee beans on hand for at home.

Also had way too much junk food and such: a Dairy Queen Blizzard, chips and dip, my first hamburger and fries in a long while. And got my first ever Papa Murphy's pizza. I didn't have a working oven in the last place, so I couldn't have baked one until recently. I got The Cowboy: Italian sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives, cheese. Good stuff, though next time I want more vegetables. There will be a next time. Mmmm....pizza.

Drank about a glass and a half of wine, all told. A real party girl, I am.

Went on a couple nice long walks with thedog. I love my trail...

Read an average of a book a day. Mmmm....books. I also spent an afternoon at the library, and much time at Goodwills looking through the book section, among other things. I pretty much hit every thrift store within easy driving distance. My wild and crazy fun is not your average wild and crazy fun.

Speaking of books, I blew a Border's 33% off coupon on Connie Willis' Blackout, which I just read but want to read again before All Clear comes out, and I don't feel like getting back into the waiting game with the library hold queue, since I can't predict when I'll actually get a book that way. Now it's mine--all mine! Bwahahah....

Wrote a lot in my journal, and bits and pieces of stories. I didn't do as much writing as I intended, honestly. It's the sitting down and starting that's the hardest part. I did, however, in the last few days, finally get my writing space organized and continued working on some short stories I had set aside.

(I also reorganized my bookshelves, and at the moment I actually have more shelf space than books. This must be remedied ASAP.)

I went to The Tea Lady (awesome store, by the way, and highly recommended for anyone who even vaguely likes tea) and got some nice orange cinnamon spice tea, and the package of blueberry rooibos I've been coveting. It smells sooo good, that blueberry tea! Good stuff, too. It's a nice evening beverage, whilst reading a book. No caffeine.

Went to Shipwreck Beads and got stuff to make more earrings. That store...it's hard to even convey it in words. It's enormous, and there's nothing like being able to actually handle the beads, hold colors together for comparison. The hardest part of visiting is narrowing down what one wants to buy.

Got Avatar from Redbox and watched it. This is the first time I've turned on the TV since I switched off cable back in June, and it took me awhile to get everything going. I spent quite awhile searching for the remote before remembering that the all-in-one was Comcast's. Duh.

The movie itself? Hm. I'd heard it called Disney's Pocahantas in space, and I think that's pretty close to the mark. The story is pretty cliched. You've got the native princess who sticks up for one of the invaders even though he starts off as a misunderstanding, boorish lout. You've got the eeeevil, greedy invaders (updated by Hollywood into representatives of the military and the corporate world) who see the natives as subhuman and expendable and just want them gone so they can steal their property. Etc. That said, it's a very pretty movie. The animation and real footage are almost seamlessly combined, more so than anything I've ever seen before, and the planet (Pandora) is gorgeous.

All in all, I rolled my eyes a number of times, but still enjoyed it.

I didn't end up going anywhere very far or very out of the norm. It's not really something to do alone, I guess. It's one of the biggest problems with being perpetually single, especially if your friends and family all have families of their own. If they do think to invite you when they go on vacation, you're a third wheel, not really sure what to do with yourself, but most vacation fun stuff is really meant for couples and families, especially in the realm of the cheap and free. And yes, I am left feeling a little wistful. It's inevitable, I suppose. Another year, when I'm not so broke, I want to go back home, to visit Dad and hang out with my sister and visit my old haunts and break more out of my day to day.

But for what it was, it was a very successful vacation.