We spent the last four days in one of those townhouses on the far right of the image. It was wonderful.
The townhouse itself was very nice. Bi-level, with two balconies front and back, wide screen TV (which we didn’t use), wireless internet (ditto), all the mod cons (though the hot water was a little on the sparse side). BBQ grill on the ground level, and a full on view of the Gulf of Mexico. We spent most of the weekend sitting out on one of the gulf-side decks. The weather was fantastic. A couple of drops of rain on the first full day, but otherwise sunny and breezy, a nice combination.
The beach out front is public, and it is a popular destination especially, apparently, on holidays. People drive their cars, trucks and SUVs out onto the beach and back up next to the water line, set up little tents and canopies, blankets and beach chairs, and frolic in the sun until it starts to go down; then they pack up and go home. It’s fun to watch, from the comfort of our balcony. We’re there on the beach like the others, but not in the midst of all the hubbub unless we really want to be. We watched the ships sail past, and scrutinized the oil rigs in the distance and watched the birds cruise past and plummet into the water after fish.
Since I’m a pale guy, I stayed out of the sun for the most part. Got a little bit of color, but anything more than that and I go straight to crimson without passing through toasty brown, and I didn’t want to torture myself. We took the bikes out on the sandy beach one afternoon, though it was pretty windy, and went wading in the gulf once when the beach crowds were thinned out. The water was warm, but I’m not a big swimmer, especially in salty gulf waters. We dined out and cooked in, made margaritas and just chilled. Four days. No shoes, no watch, no phones or computers, no one in the world knew exactly where we were and we had no idea what was going on in the world. Heavenly.
Of course, my mind doesn’t rest completely. Seems like it can’t. The first day I was sitting on the balcony and I observed something on the beach that triggered a “creative moment,” for lack of any better term, and I found myself creating a situation, and a character set, and a scene. Only problem–I had no way to capture it. I suppose I could have scared up a bunch of scraps of paper, but my wife understands me and suggested that I get a notebook when we went out to buy supplies. I wrote about four long-hand pages, probably 2000 words, after we got back. I’m not sure yet if it is the beginning of a short story or a scene from a longer work, but at least I have it captured. And it also gave me the idea for my next Storytellers Unplugged essay. I wonder if that means I can write off my vacation on my taxes?
Caught up on Big Brother last night. Natalie got caught in a whopper of a lie. What a tangled web she tried to weave, but it got tangled up in knots once the others started parsing her convoluted logic. She acts like someone untrustworthy all the time. Every time she pats herself on the back that she’s successfully conned someone, she has this grin that should betray her. She claims she plays poker, but I’d love to watch her for a while, because I think her tells are pretty obvious. Sorry to see Michelle go — she was a strong player, but she never seemed comfortable in the situation at all. Her confession to Julie about being bullied as a child was revealing. I think the cameras made her very self conscious, which hindered her play. It’s down to three, and I would love to see Jordan win, but I’d settle for Kevin.
Mad Men was pretty good this week. More eventful than last week, at least. The young jai alai fanatic was pretty funny. It’s all about the characters, in the final analysis, so we got to see Peggy with her domineering mother and with her co-workers as she tried to advertise for a roomie. I thought for sure she was going to intervene at the diet Pepsi screening, but she stayed mum. I thought Gene’s experiment with driver education was going to end in disaster, and I guess it did in a way, only not the way I expected. The preview for next week was hilarious, as it consisted completely of individual lines of dialog reacting to something we weren’t shown.
I hate it when someone uses my domain name as the spurious return address for their spam blasts. It happens every couple of months and I end up with a hundred or more bounce messages returned to random names at my domain. Looks like I’m going to have to update my spam settings to put all that stuff in a different place.
