My Seaside Life

Living by the sea is a new experience for me, one that I enjoy - most of the time anyway. :) The tides never cease to amaze me. Right now it's high tide and I'm looking out my window at water rushing furiously out of the inlet, sparkling in the sun. The water comes almost to the top rung of our makeshift ladder now, and at low tide it will not even reach the bottom of said ladder. The Lake of the Ozarks varies in height, sure, but as much in a year as the water here can do in a day!

I've started getting restless in my sleep - I haven't been doing enough is why. I've been trying to remedy that a bit in the last few days - riding my bike, etc. I rode to the library one day and did some research on Scotland and Japan, and afterwards Mary from my writing club invited me over, so I biked to her house and we ate tuna sandwiches, and she showed me her scrapbooks from when she sailed around the world, and took me into her garden and made me take cuttings from all her plants... they were so lovely, one hung upside down and looked like a delicate Japanese lantern, another was called Bleeding Heart. I found out Mary's husband died in WWII... that makes her older than I thought. A sad story, too, his plane went down and he and his crew floated on a raft for a while, until they were captured by the enemy and all of them taken as prisoners, save the pilot, her husband, who was set back adrift and never heard of again.

Yesterday dad and I went biking in the morning and explored our neighborhood. It's an enormous neighborhood with streets heading into the inter-coastal again and again. Some of the houses we found look like old Florida, interested architecture that made me want to come back with my camera. There were also occasional empty lots which we wondered about, including one that was too full of trees to have held a house, has a small and flooded boat moored to it by the water, was filled with birds, and, in a corner tucked away and hidden from the street, a little firepit, something that may have been the remains of a long abandoned garden, and the frame of a swingset. It's a big lot for the neighborhood, and I'm sure it has a story.

Last night Melissa, dad and I went to the beach for the first time since we moved here. We go there and walk for sunset, but this was the first time we spent some time there during the day. We played frisbee on the sandbar - an interesting experience because you're quite a few meters from shore, but still in knee deep water! The water was warm - no, actually hot... perhaps 90 degrees. I'm eager to take Liisa there, how strange it must seem to her, if it surprises me! :) It's even warmer than the water was in Curacao, but then, we always went to Curacao in winter...

I finally bought my ticket to Spain, and I've looked into bus fares to Valencia and then up to Pamplona, and I think I'm going to try to book those tonight. Everything's falling nicely into place for the summer trips! :) Liisa and I have done a bare minimum of preparation, but that's probably alright... still I'd like to talk to her and make sure there's nothing we need to do ahead of time yet.