Flipper

"Dolphins" the cry goes up and I turn to the water. Sure enough I turn just in time to see two graceful gray backs disappear in the waves and two more spring up just behind them.

"La!" I shout; you always shout at the beach because the sound of waves paired with a wind that whips your words away from you, makes it hard to be heard. "Look!"

As she turns to where I'm pointing we see the most fabulous sight ever. Inside a translucent green incoming wave we can see the shapes of six dolphins zigzagging over each, riding the wave towards the beach. As the wave crashes into the sand the dolphins disappear and seconds later reappear swimming parallel to the beach now. Diving in and out of the water looking like large gray stitches sewing the wave to the beach. There are six teenagers up the beach from us and two of the boys run for the water a dive in hoping to swim with the dolphins.

"Get the camera!" my sister shouts back. Holy crap, I forgot I had the camera. We see dolphins at this beach all the time and I never have, and always wish I had, the camera on hand, though the dolphins have never been this close to the beach before. Today I'd brought the camera just to get some shots of the boys in the water. I'd stashed it in it's case and then in a zippered compartment of the beach bag to keep it safe from wind, sand and spray. I fumble it out and finally get it turned on and pointed to the water, but most of the pod is gone, I manage to click the pictures below. As you can see Aidric was not exactly riveted by the sight as we were.

"Take a movie!" shouts my director. I flip the camera over to video mode but looking at the footage later, it's clear that only I would know what I was looking at.

We found this little beach just on the south end of Pt. Mugu, completely by accident one day. We were headed south toward Malibu when we saw it and decided to stop. We've been coming here ever since. It's about a half mile long bordered on one side by a fence that runs from Hwy 1 (PCH) into the water, this marks the southern edge of the Navy base, and on the other end by a mountainous hunk of rock that reaches into the water effectively closing off this little section of beach. It's never crowded and I'm not sure why. Maybe because it really is in the middle of nowhere. I mean 10 minutes north on the highway is Oxnard and 20 minutes south is Malibu and behind it to the east, just across the highway, is the Santa Monica Mountain nature preserve. Yet there are two, always manned, lifeguard towers here. There are never more than 20 or so groups here which is great because you can keep plenty of distance between you and your neighbors. This aids in not having to eat your northerly neighbors sand every time they move.

We leave the beach happy and toasted and with sand in places we didn't know sand could go. Sand is a fact of life at the beach, heck I'm just writing about the beach and I can feel grit in my sandals.

If you click on the photos they'll open in a seperate window and be a bit bigger.

The Life

Now all he needs is a foot stool and a smoking jacket.

We have a climber...

I think he thought that if he said 'mom, mom, mom' it would make it all OK. Darn that Tyson chicken anyway.

Unemployed

I am constantly surprised when I go out these days and find that the stores, malls, banks and other businesses in general are empty. I am now able to get things done more quickly while everyone else is at work.

I’ve never been a stay at home mom before. I have always worked. I liked working, it gave structure to my day, and it gave me something to bitch about. So now Aidric and I have to make our own structure and I find new things to bitch about.

Like grocery shopping for instance. I now shop with the senior brigade and I'm not talking your average retirees, no sir, these are honest to goodness octogenarians, or older. Yup, I hit the grocery store right after our morning visit to the YMCA. Which puts us inside Vons right around 11-ish, me sweaty and smelly and Aidric crabby and ready for his nap. It seems that the only other customers in the store at that time of day are the old people and sometimes they are also smelly and cranky and ready for their nap. I think that the local assisted living place must drop the lot of them off by the bus full at the same time every day.

I love the old people as much as the next person, but sometimes they work my last nerve. They double park their carts in the middle of an aisle while they chat about the fiber content of peaches. They berate the butcher because the price of the beef is too high and the labels are lettered too small to read. They harass the guy stocking shelves because the bran cereals are on the top shelf and they can’t reach them and the sugary cereals are on the bottom shelf and they can’t bend down to reach them either. They park their carts in the middle of the aisle while they read labels with a magnifying glass and are annoyed if you move their cart aside for them.

I, being young and of able body, have been enlisted to help reach things on the high shelves and the low shelves. I have been pressed into to service to read the sodium content of a can of sardines (just put them back on the shelf lady, you don’t want to know.) I have been roped in to interpret what the produce manager has just said to them, i.e. I speak louder and point. And on more than one occasion I’ve stepped in to help them with the new technology of card readers at the checkout, all the while listening to a ‘in my day’ rant.

On the other hand, they love Aidric and pat him and talk to him and tell me how handsome he is. They pat me and thank me and tell me I’m pretty. One old guy made Aidric laugh by speaking to him ‘in his own language’. Aidric and the old guy spoke gibberish back and forth to each other the whole time we waited at the checkout, Aidric loved it.

I could shop later, like after Aidric’s nap, but then I’d miss the old people and I’d have to shop with the soccer moms and they REALLY irritate me.

Male Bashing

When I go to the grocery store I always look for a female checker. Even if the male checker has a shorter line I almost always go to the woman. I’ll only go to the guy if there is no one in his line, I only have a few items and the customer ahead of me in the woman’s line is a man (male customers are just as bad as male checkers – run away. And a male customer in a male checkers line…egads!).

Women checkers are just better, because women know how to multitask. A woman checker can zip your items through with both hands moving quickly in a steady rhythm while at the same time sorting things out that need to be bagged separately. (Because the bagger is usually a clueless high school boy who WILL put your bread at the bottom of a bag of cans.) All the while noticing your lasagna noodles and giving you her special recipe for vegetarian lasagna, and still stopping to notice that you’ve purchased two bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies and did you know that you were entitled to a third bag free. She sends the bag boy off for your third bag while placing your tomatoes on the scale and bagging some of the smaller stuff herself, being careful to bag the cleaning supplies separately from the food. Then keying in the weight of the bagged tomatoes and placing the oranges on the scale, while continuing to bag and NEVER missing a beat on the recipe she’s giving you complete with precise ingredient measurements. Then when I ask if the grape juice rang up at the sale price she continues to zip things through with her left hand while her right hand scrolls through the receipt to see about the price of the juice and answering my question and still expounding on that recipe.

Doing my part to keep things moving I’ve scanned my store card through the reader and then my debit card so that she and I will complete my transaction at the same time (male customers wait until everything has been rung up before they even begin LOOKING for their store card or money.) and 5 full minutes ahead of the guy checker next to us whose merchandise ringing came to a screeching halt when the customer asked if her toothpaste was on sale.

If I’d gone to him I’d have been out of there 10 minutes later, sans extra free bag of cookies, still not knowing if my juice had been on sale and without a delightful recipe for vegetarian lasagna.

And don’t even get me started on the stock help which is almost always male. You ask a guy, who happens to be stocking an aisle near you, where the raisins are and he’ll lead you around a half dozen aisles and then proudly say ‘here they are’. Heck I could have done that, thanks. But ask a woman and she’ll say ‘Aisle 12, ‘bout three quarters of the way down on your left as you face the front of the store, second shelf from the top’.

And on that note I share the following from this mornings comics. It's small on this page but if you click on it it'll open in a separate page bigger.