When we saw it raining with the sun out last night, Junior and I hopped in the van and rushed up to to a high, clear spot – in our neighborhood, that’s the Orchard Hills Park parking lot. Sure enough, God wanted us to shop at Best Buy so badly he gave us a double rainbow leading us there.
Month: August 2007
All Full Up, Tinky Winky
I haven’t uploaded any more of the 700 or so photos I took last week because, interestingly, the hard drive on my Mac became full. That causes two problems. I can’t burn DVDs without having buffer space on the hard drive (a 4.7 gig DVD needs 4.7 gig on the hard drive, etc.) and moving things off the hard drive messes with LightRooms head, because it can’t find files it previously imported. Oh, and you need buffer space on the hard drive to edit photos, too.
I picked up a 500gig external drive at Best Buy for $119 yesterday (tax free, on sale) and I’m moving things off the Mac hard drive slowly but surely. Actually, I have no idea how I filled up the hard drive that quickly. I mean, other than something simple like shooting approximately 10gig of photos in a week. Not counting all the photos I took before last week. Hmmm.
So while we wait for me to go through the rest of the photos, I’ll take a moment to give quality feedback about last night’s showing of Grease on Nickelodeon. I liked that movie a lot when it came out a million years ago. It hardly even bothered me that high school senior Rizzo was played by a 34 year old woman. Hell, Olivia Newton John was 29. John Travolta was 24. But that’s not my complaint. My complaint (no, not the fact that “You’re the One That I Want” is now stuck in my head) is all the smoking. This movie used smoking to show that the characters were “bad” and “cool” all at the same time. You know Danny’s a bad-ass when school starts because he turns around from talking to three middle-aged high school girls and there’s a butt hanging off his lower lip. I wanted Junior to watch this movie because I remembered it one way. But his first comment was “Why are they smoking?” Sure, it’s set in 1959, and maybe smoking was actually allowed on campus back then, but good Lord, even Sandy pulls on a butt (amateurishly) in the final carnival scene to show that she’s no longer a goodie-two-shoes. What the hell? And now that I’m an old lady myself, what the hell is wrong with being a goodie-two-shoes? Why can’t we keep the Pollyanna version of Sandy and the lettermen sweater version of Danny at the end?
I still like the movie, and other than that (and the Rizzo pregnancy scare) it is a fun movie with good songs. And it’s fun to show the boy what High School Musical was based on. But with someone smoking in literally EVERY scene of this movie, I’m questioning if it belonged on the Nick at Night lineup at 8pm. Call me a prude, but it was a bit much, even for me.
That Sobbing Sound Is Me
Okay, I’m not that bad. Well, I did throw my arm across my forehead like a 1930s movie star when I saw how much laundry I have to do, the lack of food in the fridge, and the fact that the upstairs toilet doesn’t want to flush. You know, all the goodness of home!
I’m pulling the final vacation photos off the cards right now. We stopped for lunch in Sandwich (heh) and Mr. Dump requested water view dining, which over the course of the week cost the 7 of us approximately $400 for two meals (including a lunch where two of us had tuna melts), so you know I was a little apprehensive.
We were headed for a place we ate lunch at in 2005, but we spotted “Seafood Sams” in the same area and decided that would be a much cheaper choice. And it was. Food was pretty good (clam strips and FANTASTIC ONION RINGS) with a view of the channel, so we saw boats going by, including a tugboat hauling ass and a very large ship that we couldn’t figure out for the life of us. It looked like it had HVAC stuff on the deck, so we decided it was full of frozen fish. We have no idea if we were right, but who is going to tell us it wasn’t?
Mr. Dump let me take a bunch of photos in the marina and on the canal, thus ending my vacation with a little photo shoot that actually made me feel happy because it meant that my day included something other than packing and driving home.
On the canal I spotted a ginormous yacht…I mean, words don’t do this thing justice. I made sure I got a picture with the name of it so I could look it up. I’m on the website right now, looking at the photos of the interior, and it’s enough to make you ill with envy. The funny thing was that this yacht was towing a boat that most of us could never afford. Sort of like a million dollar motor home towing a BMW behind it. So here is my photo of the yacht, along with the link to the info about her.
The Panic is Setting In
We’re staring down the end of vacation now, and I’m starting to get depressed. I don’t want this to end. I don’t think we’ve done everything we wanted to. I don’t ant to go back to my routine. Shocking, of course, given how fabulous this house and the location and the ocean and the tacky gift shops are. Who wants to leave that behind? I’m typing this on the deck, rootbeer at my side, looking out at the tide coming in and the sun going down. The sky is glorious (photos to follow, maybe later tonight or tomorrow) and if you know me at all, you know how much I love a glorious sky. Clouds fascinate me, sunsets thrill me. I have both tonight. I don’t want to go home, because I can’t see the sun setting on the ocean from my house, damn the luck!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant. I know a lot of people who didn’t get to go to the beach this week, and I know I should just keep my woe-is-me good fortune to myself. But I’m still really sad that the week is winding down. I want to start all over from the beginning, damn it!
Scofflaw
The place we’re staying is surrounded by killer rabbits. At least, that’s what we call them. Actually, now we call them the No Trespassing Rabbits because obviously they don’t care for our signs and warnings.
So far we’ve seen a ton of rabbits, a doe, and a fox. Deb thought there was a fishercat sort of growling in the tall grass near the house, but we don’t have a visual confirmation on that. It definitely wasn’t a rabbit. Well, it could have been a killer rabbit, I suppose.
Last night we had a pouring rainstorm (we estimated about an inch of rain based on what was inside a large plastic bin we had out on the deck and had emptied earlier in the day. This morning it’s just dank and foggy and we all feel completely wet. They say there will be sun later today, but it may rain again. That’s okay, we haven’t been to a Christmas Tree Shop yet, plus we still need to find some pirate ships that will actually float in the water. You know, the life of a vacationing 9-year-old is a busy one.
[More pictures uploaded, including another version of the sun behind clouds photo from Sunday]