The Time Sink

Interesting... We had a very light crowd in town yesterday... Usually people start drifting in on Friday when the holiday falls over the weekend, but the beach traffic was light both Friday and Saturday. ...and light enough Sunday for Shelley to take the boys down so they could board (I napped since I didn't get a lot of sleep Saturday night).

...and the sand castle contest viewers seemed light to me too, but I was taking pictures of a friend's castle (literally) that my guys ended up helping on, and I thought maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

...but when I got back upstairs and looked down over the parade crowd, I could definitely see attendance was down about 30% or better from years past. ...and when I went to take a shot of the "full beach" scene, the same routine played out: people just weren't packing themselves in shoulder to shoulder as in the past.

I more or less took the day off yesterday. I wasn't feeling all that well; I think the lack of sleep on the 4th and the ocean workouts (and maybe one particular breakfast burrito <g>) did me in a bit... So I lazed around and cleaned the place up some and caught up on email.

...and the kickback time continued when some friends stopped by and we headed out to dinner with them. Other than running things way too late (over an hour to be seated), that worked out well.

I'd love to do a "Top Ten" of "Signs You've been in the Ocean too Long", but I'll settle for just a few:

• When the cormorants are between you and the shore and more or less ignore you...
• When your fingers are white because your body is shifting blood to the core to protect those organs...
• When you realize you only had to pay the fuel bill to get a 'teeth whitening' treatment (sand)...
• When you ignore the eight foot waves 'cause you're waiting for 'the big ones'...
• When the kids in wetsuits go in because they're too cold... (nope, I don't wear one)
• When that last huge wave runs you all the way up onto the shore and you know you've had a good afternoon...

We had friends over for dinner and dessert last night. They try to come over the week after the 4th so the kids can get together and play a bit in other venues. Other than the obvious beach scene, yesterday they spent the morning at the tide pools down in Morro Bay ("Hey, Dad, we saw an eel!") with the other boys' father; and this morning Nature Guide Shelley will be taking them to feed the ground squirrels down by Moro Rock.

Yeah, yeah... Meet "Rocky":

We ended up spending much of the morning in Morro Bay, shopping and having lunch. When we finally got back to the condo everyone just crashed for several hours...

The universal naps were a clue that maybe we had pretty much overdone things the last few days. Dinner turned into snacks and we ended up walking around town as evening faded...

We're home... We got to cleaning yesterday and more or less just kept going. ...all the way back home.

...and while I don't think we'll do it again (we're all a little wasted from lack of sleep and too much cleaning), we are spending the night in our own beds. ...and the cats are very, very happy we're home.

My apologies to the others in the dial-up crowd: I'll get to archiving the blog later today. So far I'm managed to get the xml feed fixed (Dreamweaver decided it knew more about the feed than I did; the next trip I'll use BBedit to handle it) and the mail downloaded (yeah, a couple of multi-meg artsy things for two different sites; I gotta' look into dsl here).

I'm working on readjusting to the heat here... Coming from a week in the low sixties to weather in the mid nineties usually throws me off for a day or two. I bladed yesterday evening to start working on those muscle groups and to see how the heat was and did okay. "Okay" meaning I didn't hit the full route and I loaded up on Gatorade before and after. ...and slept something like three hours over my usual. Yeah, adaptation.

Administrative note: one of the servers used by various netizens and residents of the blogosphere took a hit last night; if you were looking for or writing to anyone using that particular package, you might try again. The server is back up (my .com is on it), but the emails may or may not have gone through. Evolution on the Linux box 'held' my outbounds to addresses on that server for DNS failure; that resolved sometime this morning.

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

    Thanks for visiting!  
All content Copyright 1999->2004 Daniel C. Bowman. Most rights reserved.