SHARK!!!

My older daughter, Heather, told me this morning that she and her husband are going this weekend to the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. When she mentioned the trip to a friend, the friend protested, "There are sharks in the Gulf!"

Well, yes there are; it's where they live. Heather told her friend that being at a salt water beach is where she is happiest, and I agree, although in my case, the beach is tied with a Har-Tru tennis court. I don't have access to either one since I moved from Florida.  sigh.

Heather said that she had read that more people are killed each year by being fallen on by a cow than by being attacked by a shark. We laughed. I said I didn't know anyone fallen on by a cow, so a shark attack was even less likely.

Ooops.  I realized after the conversation that I DID know someone who was attacked by a shark and who had a really mangled wrist to prove it. I was at the hair salon, having my hair returned to its God-intended color (strawberry blonde in case you wondered), when the woman who sat down next to me had her wrist all bandaged up. The shampoo girl asked what had happened.

The woman explained that she had been on Cumberland Island, and after she and her daughter had run the circumference of the island, they lay down in very shallow water, held themselves up by putting their hands down on the sand, and kicked just to cool off after the run. Suddenly the woman's hand was in a shark's mouth.

A fast boat ride to the mainland later, the woman met her husband at the hospital. She showed us photos of her wrist and arm. When I told her that I was surprised that she had thought to take photos, she told me that she hadn't, that she was in shock at that point, and that her husband had taken them. 

Of course he had. What is wrong with men? When I broke my wrist, was covered in mud from the swamp I fell in, and was wrapped in a sheet to protect the furniture in the ER, my husband took a photo. I deleted it when I discovered it. Ugh.

Anyway, the woman's wrist and arm were put back together, and I'm sure she is fine by now. But the shampoo girl asked, "Are you sure it wasn't a whale?"

In two feet of water???  C'mon.


Anyway, Heather, here is a chart to keep in mind:

Shark's view from below the surface

Just don't go surfing, ok?

And I guess don't stand next to any cattle?


(I suppose she read the cow/shark statistic on the internet, so it must be true, right? Seems unlikely though.)

Ten on Tuesday, only it's Wednesday

There is a Ten on Tuesday thing going around blog world, and I missed out on it, and I'm not officially a part of it anyway, so here goes, even though I missed it by a day.  I think this week's prompt is "things you like or love," something like that.

1.  Nice weather, blue skies and the beach. I count them as one thing. I am not AT the beach, which I am somewhat put out about, but I do like, as in love, the beach. 
[OH! The word "beach" reminds me of a French exchange student who stayed with us when younger daughter was in high school. One day a male student walked into the cafeteria, and the exchange student said to my daughter: He looks like a man who has beaches. My daughter couldn't understand how someone who owned beaches would look any different from anyone else. After a confusing conversation, she realized that the French student was saying "B*tches" and therefore, the male student looked like a pimp. The French students seemed a bit more, um, advanced? than the students from the Atlanta suburbs; I'm pretty sure a local student's first thought upon seeing this guy would not be pimp.]

2.  A really good dentist. I was at the dentist's this morning, and his motto is that he doesn't want his patients to ever feel pain or even discomfort, so although I was there three hours ago, my lips and face are still pretty numb, which means that my mouth was really, really, really numb while the dentist was working on my teeth.  

3.  My cats. They be crazy.

4.  My trainer.  I don't love him; I LIKE him as a trainer.  As a person, he is ....unusual. He is 64, but sure doesn't look it because he trains all the time, all day long, and he looks like he's a 30-year old Navy Seal. However, as a bonus, my training provides me with a lot of drama (his, not mine). He was engaged to a woman in the Philippines until two weekends ago when he and she were "virtual married" over Skype. Is that even legal? I have no idea. He wore a tux; she wore a white dress. There was a reception, in the Philippines, so he wasn't at it but about 30 people were. He showed me his marriage certificate obtained from who knows where. She is getting a Master's degree in marketing and will move here once she finishes her courses this spring. He has been to visit her and her family several times, but I do wonder if she actually knows how old he is; she is, I believe, in her 20s. I need to keep training with him until she moves here so that I can see how it all shakes out. I hope it works out for them. He does seem like a nice guy, even if a bit...I'm not sure what.

5.  Shrimp risotto. I am making it for dinner tonight.

6.  My iThings, even though they are smarter than I am.

7.  Friends and family, of course. Goes without saying, except I am having trouble thinking of ten things and I'm hungry but can't eat yet.

8.  Ah! Airplanes. Makes going places so much quicker.

9.  Hmmm. British comedies and mysteries.

10.  Oh---Jon Stewart. But he is retiring. Rats. I don't think anyone can replace him. Maybe John Oliver, but he already has his own show. 

So that is ten for Tuesday on Wednesday.

And I usually have photos on my posts, so here is today's (random) photo:

Scrambled eggs on tostados, spicy sauce, avocados, bacon, fruit, and hashbrowns

My usual breakfast last year in Mexico.

I AM hungry.

If I Could Pick One Holiday

to go full tilt on, said the man across the aisle and one row ahead of me on the bus, it would be Valentine's Day.

I call bs on that. What man really loves Valentine's Day, c'mon.

I took a Greyhound bus last week for the first time in, oh, five decades or so, to get to Atlanta from Savannah. I had helped a friend drive from West Virginia to Port Royal, SC where she rented a house for a break from the winter at home. Anyone I tell that I took the bus says with a worried look, Oh, how was it? as if it were a new, mysterious way to get around.

Well, it was just like flying, except nowhere near as crowded, and on the ground instead of in the air. And the real bonus:  I didn't have to deal with airports on either end of the trip. But I do wonder how Greyhound stays in business if all of their routes are as poorly travelled as this one was. 

The one thing that has stayed the same from five decades ago is the people on the bus, specifically the odd ones. The man who spoke about his favorite holiday spent the entire three-hour trip between Savannah and Macon, GA trying to persuade some woman that she and he should be in a "relationship," a word that I heard him say over and over.

Well, good luck, sir.

When I last took a bus trip, it was over five hours long and a young woman who got on in one small town spent her time on the bus shrieking about problems she was having, and how she was going to get off at such-and-such town and kill herself. 

Well, alrighty, then.  

At another town, a man got on and decided that he could help her. I am suspicious of what help he was planning to offer, but they both got off the bus a few towns away from where he got on.  

I am sure that just as many slightly-off kilter people travel by air, but the planes are too loud to allow eavesdropping, thank goodness.

However! In the non-bus-related portion of the trip, I loved the Spanish Moss. It was much more lush than any I saw in Savannah, gorgeous. (I may have taken a lot of photos of the moss.)

 

We ate lots of seafood, including at this cute place, which collects dollar bills donated and signed by customers. They covered almost every surface in the place, including on the ceilings in some of the rooms.  When all of the surfaces fill up with dollars, the owner takes some down and donates them to a local charity, which accepts the dollars even though they are signed, drawn on and painted. The bank accepts them and they are probably destroyed and replaced by the treasury.  

 

We ate here one night, and watched as shrimp boats came in for the night.

We did very little shopping in Beaufort but I like the name of this business:

Guess what they sell.

And of course, we went to my favorite place, the beach.

It is at Hunting Island State Park, and it is a beautiful place, with a very narrow road leading through the pines and low shrubbery native to the area. There weren't many birds at all, but we did see a male bluebird. Who knew? They like the beach?

This is the lighthouse at the park:

Nope, it is not near the water, and that is because it HAS been near the water, and then IN the water since it was built in the 1800s. Storms constantly change the shoreline here, the lighthouse has been moved several times and since it is no longer used, it's just a tourist attraction with the addition of ---of course!---a gift shop.

Now, back to normal, which apparently means gray rainy weather. 

And knitting.

The Beach at Cancun

My only surviving video.  Look at the color of that water!
This was taken from the ferry---not the one that tried to drown us/this is from the one we took later in the day.

Da beeps

Older daughter is on vacation at the beach off the coast of Texas and e-mailed me this photo of Elizabeth. She captioned it: Elizabeth isn't sure she likes da beeps. Older daughter claims to be taking the week off from using electronic gadgets (although she did send out this photo), but if she is true to her word, I can steal this photo and use it on MY blog!

I think the problem is that Elizabeth would rather be at Knittergran's.

Knittergran has m&ms...

and knows how to use them.

Ah, Mexico...

First of all, there's the beach. Sigh....... I really, really miss the beach.


A week ago today I left the warmth of the Yucatan in Mexico. This is the third year that I have gone with friends to various places in Mexico: the first trip was to Sayulita, a small fishing village north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific; the second was to San Miguel de Allende, a centuries-old city in the high desert in the center of the country; and this year we went to Puerto Morelos, a tiny fishing village between Cancun and Playa del Carmen on the Caribbean.

SO, first things first. The top picture is the beach in front of our house; the second picture is the view from my BED!!! I fell asleep every night watching the white foam from the waves breaking on the beach. I awoke every morning to the soft sounds of the waves washing up onto the beach. It was a wonderfully relaxing vacation.

But Cancun and Playa del Carmen are so Americanized, Canadianized, and Europeanized that they are cities I have no interest in visiting. The beachfronts are lined with wall-to-wall, enormous, gaudy resorts, condos, and hotels. Instead of staying there, we rented a house on the beach just north of the town of Puerto Morelos. It was quiet and sort of remote, but I suspect, based on the construction already begun, that in under five years it too will be overbuilt and overrun by tourists from all over the world. That's just fine; I understand. I am, after all, a tourist too. I know that resorts are perfectly nice places and they provide jobs for the locals, but I prefer being where I can see old Mexico, or at the very least, Mexican Mexico. San Miguel de Allende, by contrast, was wonderful, and I could go back there again and again. It's centuries old, very colonial, and we were able to rent a 400-year old house in the center of town. Amazing!

There was little to do in terms of sight-seeing in this part of the Yucatan. We did drive inland one day to a place called Coba, where there is a large site full of ruins from the Mayans. It was in what the locals call a jungle, but I guess it's technically a "dry" jungle. Our pedi-cab driver was a descendant of the Mayans and could speak Mayan as well as Spanish and some English. He took two of us on an hour tour of the many ruins. The third of us had been there thirty years ago and took the time to go bird-watching.

I considered climbing this, and then, after watching a youngish man struggle to get down the ruin, re-considered and just took pictures. It really was amazing to see these old, old structures, and picture the Mayans building and using them, and living in the jungle many centuries ago. Below is a typical Mayan residence built of sticks side by side for walls, and thatch for the roof. Usually, two or more of these were joined by walkways for a family's home. I suppose this is not original, but there were enough of them scattered around everywhere we drove once we were inland that I suspect that some people still build and use them. The poverty in Mexico is stunning, and so it's no surprise that people would still live in these.

The Yucatan and the jungle are supposed to be filled with wild and potentially dangerous animals: jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, crocodiles, boa constrictors, and coatamundis. The coatamundi and crocodile are the only wild animals we saw, much to my dismay! I really wanted to see monkeys in the wild, and a jaguar would have been a treat (as long as I was in a car or a building).

Meet Mr. or Mrs. Coatamundi. He is wild, but he was near a hut where the staff sells snacks and water. I saw tourists tossing food to this guy, so that's why he was so accommodating about having his photo taken.

Anyhow, the trip to Mexico was wonderful. It is the first of the trips where it occurred to me that I was someplace WARM when it was COLD at home. During the past two trips I was so entertained by sight-seeing and doing other tourist things that I hadn't even considered what a really GREAT idea Mexico is in January!