Collected Thoughts

elenabtvs asked me these Five Questions. If any one wants me to ask them Five Questions leave a message in my comments.

BTW my answers are long because no matter how hard I try ( I'm long winded. )

So I'm back for good. First thing I learned was MCI screwed me over. I signed up for international long distance so I could call elenabtvs and I was told one price and that "sure you can hang up and call right away. Instead I was hit with charges of appx $1.25/minute. So I have to deal with that. Also my phone got disconnected, I forgot to go pay it and I'm not that great at paying my phone bill on time anyway so it's been disconnected for a few days and I have to go in and pay that.

On top of that Dad dumped a bunch of stuff in my room. Some stuff I've been keeping in the living room because it belongs in the living room--tapes and dvds things like that. And some is stuff he said he'd put in the attic---winter clothes that have been sitting in plastic containers in the house since it turned warm because Dad's never gone up to the attic. In the garage there are four or five boxes of my stuff just sitting there becuase he hasn't put them in the attic. He says there is no room. I do have a lot of videos that I never watch that I'm going to get rid of somehow.

So all that crap combined with all the stuff I brought back from the beach---my room. I can't find anything. It's just in boxes or bags or sitting around. School starts tomorrow and I did pull out clothes to wear and iron them and find a purse and my ID which isn't even valid, I have to get a new one made tomorrow.

But I'll be all tan and freckled! I can't believe how tan I am. Or that I didn't get anyone to take a close up picture of me while I was at the beach, I still have 8 or 9 pictures left on the disposable camera so I'll take it over to Mom's so she can take a few pictures of me. The inside lighting at the beach sucks so today was the first time I got to really check out how tan I am. For the first time I'm not just freckled. But actually tan. Only my right arm is more tan than my left. I don't know how that happened. Since I won't be getting out in the sun every day I expect it to fade before the end of the week.

I don't know how I'm going to handle people. I've barely been around them. Just my family and even then I was basically around kids. But real live people is goign to be interesting. I came home and Dad had on the tv---he was just watching Pretty Woman. I tried to think about what I'd be doing if I was still at the beach, and if my cousins were down I'd be over there playing cards and visiting. If not, well okay, I might be watching one of the tapes I took down (S3 &4 Due South and S3 &4 BtVS) but probably I'd be listening to cds and either thinking up possible song vids to them or dreaming up stories or just writing. I spent a lot of time going over this one Due South story in my head, it was hard to keep trying to write it down. My hand would get tired and I would have to start over, I have it spread out over three different notebooks. Then there are the BtVS story ideas, that are started in several different places.

Plus the writing I did about the beach and things like that. I didn't go out walking as much these last few days, it got really hot, August weather hit. I'm not sure of the temperature. Also I was in a news blackout---not having access to tv and the radio reception was really bad and I couldn't get NPR very well. My great aunt and uncle, well I coudn't go over there and see what was going on. I went down to get the paper a few times. I never did get the distance right but it's something like 7 or 8 miles one way just to get a paper. Mom called and told me about the blackout and then I also talked to Dan. When I did go over to my great aunt and uncle's I only heard about the recall in California becuase they always had it on FOX News and it seemed that was the only thing FOX NEWS was covering.

This is just stuff off the top of my head. I still have all the pages I coherently wrote to sit down and type out. Things from my journal and in various notebooks. And after that I can work on typing up all the pages and pages of stories I have, I do have different drafts of the same idea but I would like to get them all on the computer. It'll help my typing which seems to have gotten rusty from disuse. I missed typing.The feel of my fingers flying across the keyboard during chat or when I'm tryign to get my thoughts down. Not just when I was writing, although I missed it there, when my fingers cramped from holding the pen, or I kept crossing out sections and drawing arrows or starting over I missed the computer. But I missed typing, the act of it, even just to type drills would have been nice. Exercise my fingers.

I didn't get to do as much kayaking as I wanted to---the weather was a tease. It would be windy and white caps would kick up and then the wind would die down and the bay would go calm. But up in the sky black clouds would loom ominously. Just hanging there, taunting me. Not doing anything--no thunder, no lightning, just enough of a threat to keep me out of the water.

One day though, the weather didn't tease. The wind died back and the water went calm and the sky had been bright blue, the water indigo. There were some clouds but off in the distance, it looked like one of those storms that was goign to threaten and then blow over. I saw a huge school of bait fish, I suck at distances so I can't say how much it covered. I could my referencing the land marks but that doesn't mean anything. However it was big--half the length of a football field maybe? Anyway , the gulls were going crazy and the bait fish were flashing on the surface so I'm sure the larger fish were tearing it up underneath. I went up to get the cell phone to call Dad and tell him about this. I came back down and when I got back the sky was dark, the bay was gunmetal gray with white caps, the wind was whipping around. The birds that had been going crazy over the bait fish were having trouble staying on course through the wind. I looked up in time to see an osprey fly above me, just gliding sideways on the wind. There was some lightning off in the distance, but mostly it was just wind and dark cloudes and the rough waves. I called Mom, told her about the storm, stood there in the wind as it blew around until the lightning started getting closer and I went inside. It didn't rain much or hard, just a wind storm and then it was over. I went out and the water was too rough to kayak, the water had gone back to indigo and the sky was clear blue with white clouds. But at the time it was so damn cool.

Another night my cousin...actually it's my dad's first cousin, his wife and 5 of their kids. So my dad's cousin told us (his girls, wife, and me) we should go out and watch the lightning. Some of us did and we stood out on the beach at low tide,at night and watched the lightning far off in the distance. It was too far away to strike us. Great flashes of light---bombs bursting in air or giant cameras flashing. Huge flashes that lit up the night like day, bolts of lightning ripping across to the horizon. We stayed out there a long time then most of the girls went inside and it was just me and one of the girls, the one going into middle school. We sat on the deck and watched the storm and talked until the storm got too close.

I love to watch storms. There was so much rain that never got to us. It was so easy to see it in the distance, like that when there aren't any trees to obscure the horizon. Looking out across the bay, the space between the clouds and land looks misted over, or like dark smudge. Sometimes a piece of land looks enshrouded in fog. And you know it's rain, the edges are easy to see. The best is when the wind blows the storms across the open water, it's easier to track the storm's movement. See it the clouds and the smudge of rain move over land, across the horizon, over water, see boats running fast and hard to make it back to shore, see the storm move one. Move past. Disappear.

One day there were barges going off into the Gulf, they looked like fat caterpillars meandering along the ground.

Walking outside meant always seeing something cool and new. And now I think about the drive I have, not bad compared to some people's. If I commuted maybe I could people watch, but there's nothing I could observe in the city that can be half as interesting as sitting there watching a heron "dance" to corral fish he's chasing. Or taking a walk and encountering an electric eel. Or kayaking and seeing a sea turtle. A sea turtle! There were sad sights though. The last walk I took though, where I saw something stange in the sand and realised it was a large female horseshoe crab, mostly buried in the sand. I couldn't unbury her, and I couldn't tell if she was part of a mating pair, if there was a male buried under the sand as well. Idon't know what happened. I only hope that it wasn't a person, that someone didn't flip her over and then she couldn't right herself and she died as a result. Later on, up on the beach, above the high tide line, I saw another large horsehoe crab, I'm assuming it was female as well. Dead. I don't know how it died or how it got up there. Again I can only hope that people weren't carelessly, maliciously killing them. For fun. Just to see.

I also learned that what I thought were sickly looking sting rays were actually a harmless type of skate.