A Walk On The Beach

Today we got more rain than you could shake a stick at. Well, shake a stick at and stay dry. I guess what I'm saying is you would end up with a wet stick. Dolly apparently continued to push scattered thunderstorms through the area completely drenching us. At least I assume it was Dolly's doing, I haven't really been following the weather other than occasionally peeking at a local radar plot really. The drenching was only for a couple hours in the middle of the afternoon. After that aside from standing water along the streets you wouldn't have been able to tell there had been any rain at all. I will say with the power station (transformers maybe?) literally across the street within throwing distance of our house we've had some really close lightning strikes. Like where everything goes white outside the window and you hear the thunder almost before you see the lightning and all the smoke detectors in the house go off for a bit. Really gives you warm fuzzies all over. The staticy back of the neck hair raising fuzzies anyway.


Luckily the rain didn't start up until Ginger and the kids got back from the water park. Yep, the kids have decided the water park is the best thing about the beach (second best for Quinn, for him the best is getting to go drive go-karts). I skipped out on going today and logged in to do some work instead. The water park isn't that big and there's only so many times I can go down the water slide and not injure myself (while it can accommodate adults, it's really not made for them). That picture above is the kids at the slide that I took from the house while taking a break from work.


After all the rain passed we headed south to Rita's for ice cream. It's funny how driving eight miles to get somewhere down here seems like it takes an eternity and yet back home eight miles is considered nothing. Once we got back from our ice cream run we decided to go take a walk on the beach. Quinn insisted on bringing our beach tennis ball to throw around, which meant more than once I got a bit soaked by waves fetching it out of the ocean from his wild pitches. I wouldn't have minded as much if I hadn't been wearing jean shorts.






As we walked along Quinn was all about walking as fast as possible and playing while Catherine was hanging back and collecting seashells. I don't get it really, she's to the point now where she'll say she doesn't want to go to the beach, but once she's there she doesn't want to leave and just runs around collecting shells. She found a collection of shells someone had left that included a bunch of partially broken conch shells. I was impressed just to see the broken conch shells. In all the times I've been down here I think I can count on one hand the number conch shells I've seen and I don't think I've ever seen a conch shell in anything approaching decent condition. Once everything was said and done Catherine returned with another bucket full of shells (at this point I'm wondering how we're going to have room in the car on the trip home for anything other than shells).












As we were walking along I took pictures for a while, but then Ginger took over the picture taking duties, so this whole last batch of shots are her's (I would even go as far to say her shots are the superior ones). I didn't have time to play around with any of the pictures in Gimp, so the processing on some of them are quick Picasa tweaks (mostly to get rid of the misty quality that was in most of the photos)