Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

Bobby and I left on Monday to spend a few days on the coast of Maine. It was his agreement, when we moved here, that he would take his Elven wife at least once per year to see the ocean. In reality, we are not any farther from the sea than when we lived in Maryland, and the drive is a good bit shorter, because Maryland traffic.

This will mostly be a picture post because we didn't do a whole lot that was exciting. (I lied. I wrote more than expected. Oops.) We ate some wonderful seafood and spent a lot of time on the beach. We took the Goldens with us, but I want to round up a bunch of Golden photos and do a separate post for Rhapsody. <3

( Pictures Below the Cut )

On Tuesday, we were to receive the paddleboards we had attempted to rent the previous day and return to St. Andrew's State Park. Bobby had found a highly rated Mexican restaurant in the area that opened at 10 for lunch, so we planned to grab a bite to eat there and then head over to the park. We had a catamaran cruise scheduled that evening and had to be at the marina at 5, so we actually were working on a schedule for once. (Usually, our schedule more or less matches the sun: When the sun starts to set, we come off the beach and get supper.)

Of course, we showed up at the restaurant, and they were closed. Allow me a brief grouse about places that make changes and don't update their websites. Seriously, folks, as someone who has managed a website for eight years now? It's not that hard. Bobby found another lunch place that was supposed to open at 10. We drove out, found it ... and they were also closed because this was the day they were having a new stove installed. We were both grouchy at this point. I made a snarky remark about just going to someplace I invented in my grouchiness called Happy Jack's Happy Flappy Flapjack House. I just ... don't like breakfast. Well, I like Bobby's breakfast, which has been carefully honed over many years to my tastes. I don't like dessert, so why would I want to eat what amounts to dessert at the beginning of the day too? We ended up at a Waffle House because it is one of the few places that has breakfast that I like: a peanut butter waffle (with no syrup for the love of all things holy!) and a double hashbrown with cheese, onions, and jalapeños. When this is the biggest blip in your vacation, you're doing alright.

We headed over to the park, and Bobby called the stand-up paddleboard (SUP) rental guy. Within ten minutes, he was pulling into the park with the boards strapped to the top of his truck. So the day was looking better already.

Bobby mentioned wanting to try SUPing about two years ago, when we saw people doing it in Ocean City. At the time, the joints in my feet were so swollen and painful that I wanted to weep for the thought of standing on a board and trying to float across water on it and them by extension. I made up my mind that I would miserably have to endure it for Bobby's sake. Well, thank goodness that chapter of life is behind me. I was actually able to enjoy it--it was quite a lot of fun!

St. Andrew's State Park is located at one end of Panama City Beach. In the 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the Gulf-Bay Pass to allow for shipping traffic to pass between the Grand Lagoon and the Gulf of Mexico. On the west side of the channel is St. Andrew's State Park; the east became Shell Island, which I'll say more about when we go there. Several rock jetties were built, which on the St. Andrew's side, block most of the effect of the surf and create a very calm area for swimming ... or learning to SUP, in our case!

( More and pictures below the cut )

Sunday was a wickedly cold and windy day. Remember how I posted that we got in the hot tub on Saturday night, and I was all proud for walking barefoot in the snow? While Bobby and I were in the hot tub, we were talking about what we thought the temperature was and whether this was the coldest weather in which we'd ever been in a hot tub. "Oh, it's probably about 7-8F," we figured (-13 to -14C). Which would have been the coldest for me but not Bobby, who got in the hot tub in Deep Creek Lake once when it was 4F/-16C. Well, the taxi driver who took us to the train station this morning was the same who picked us up on Saturday night, and we were talking about the extremity of cold compared to home and how it was -20F/-29C in Stowe when Bobby woke up this morning, and the taxi driver was like, "Well, that's nothing considering that it was -24F/-31C when I picked you up on Saturday!" OMGWTFWHY WAS I IN A HOT TUB WHEN IT WAS -24F. It does make me feel less wimpy for my reluctance to strip down to my swimsuit once I was outside in the apparently -24 temperatures and much more badass for my barefoot dash through the snow back into the B&B clad only in a bikini. And it's an item I can check of my to-do list of stupid-things-that-done-once-one-has-no-need-to-repeat. (Actually, it really wasn't that bad!)

Randy the innkeeper at our B&B makes a pot of homemade soup every day at around 4 o'clock, when the mountain closes and all the skiers/boarders start to come back. The soup is complimentary, and pretty much everyone gathers in the common room at 4 o'clock or so to thaw out with a cup (or in my case, to just eat it because I'm hungry and love soup). Sunday, it was black bean soup. Bobby and I were eating soup and debating where we wanted to go for supper. We wanted sushi, but there was a sushi bar within walking distance of the B&B and also the Matterhorn, which is considered one of the best ski apres bars in the country. (THE WORLD!!! ... okay, I don't actually know if it is in the world; I just wanted to yell THE WORLD!!! and wave my hands about on my journal in a dramatic fashion.)

We asked Randy, and he couldn't really choose one as better than the other, so we decided on the Matterhorn, even though we'd need to take a taxi to get there. (Well, initially, we tried to stand out and wait for the free Stowe shuttle, but the wicked cold and winds was just a little too much to bear for me.) We just couldn't pass up the chance to try one of the best ski apres bars in the country. I'm glad we did; the food was incredible, and we had the best time. We ordered three sushi rolls to start, and Bobby ordered Buffalo wings for his main while I had the "Matterhorn bowl," which was pretty much a blend of different sushi chopped small over rice with "yummy sauce." I had wanted to try real sushi (not just rolls), and this was a good way to do it since the pieces were small and mixed with other things. I really liked it. We washed all of this down with several Switchback Ales, one of the local beers. We tried it, I liked it and didn't have an allergic reaction to it, so I drank it for the remainder of the trip with nary a wayward itch. (A sign that I'm potentially allergic to a beer is itching in weird spots, like behind my elbows.)

( More and Pictures below the Cut! )

I've been in Ocean City all this week (hence I'm quieter than usual, i.e., pretty much silent except for handling site-related stuff), home last night. It was a beautiful week for the beach and, all in all, pretty nondescript, which is sometimes exactly what a vacation needs to be.

My parents came down with us for the first half of the week. I woke up Sunday morning, post-beestung nose, with diffuse facial swelling that made me look rather like a non-cute Avatar character: non-cute because, unfortunately, the swelling didn't also come with large luminous eyes and blue skin; I just looked puffy and weird. We left on Sunday and got into town around 1:30 and had the traditional arrival lunch at Piezano's, then headed for the beach. The temperatures this week were in the low 80s (~27C), sunny, but with a breeze off the ocean that kept the beach cool. Actually, at times, it was almost chilly.

A breeze off the sea is not good for surfing, though, as it flattens the waves. Poor Bobby has had awful surfing all week. ( More and pictures below the cut! )

I think this weekend can be said to finally usher in summer, for reals yo (as my students would say), at least in the House of Felagund. We had the first day of cultural summer (Memorial Day) and the first day of meteorological summer (June 1), but the chilliness lingered back home, and it just didn't feel like summer yet.

Thursday, Bobby and I went to see Jack Johnson in concert in the evening at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia. This is one of our favorite venues: outdoors; nice, vast, soft lawn; doesn't take forever and a day to get in or out. (DC venues could take a page out of there playbook there.) We stopped for supper at our favorite restaurant from when we lived in Ellicott City, the Trolley Stop; our usual server was still there and still remembered us. We arrived at Merriweather when the gates opened at 6, and the line was already massive, and we ended up near the back of the lawn. ( Read more... )

Bobby and I went to Ocean City again this weekend. We took the Goldens again and also met my parents this time. We had a great time. We took a half-day from work on Friday and made really good time getting there; the traffic over the Bay Bridge can be hell. We arrived 15 minutes after my parents and, after getting unpacked, headed to the beach. The shelling was really good again this time, and we found several sand dollars as well as a number of pretty shells.

Like last time, it was cold and windy when we arrived. Aside from the late-afternoon beach walk (which my parents skipped), we stuck indoors on Friday: went to dinner at Adolfo's, a lovely Italian restaurant on the Boardwalk, and went back to the hotel to hang around the pool. Saturday, though, the weather was gorgeous: 68F/20C, sunny, no wind, and not a cloud in the sky. Bobby and I took the Goldens down to the beach at about noon; within a few minutes, we had stripped down to summertime clothing and removed our shoes, the weather was so perfect. Not surprisingly, we were among the only people on the beach. I told Bobby that I thought it was fitting that we were probably among the first people of 2014 to sit on the OC beach in beach chairs! :D

We ended up staying for close to three hours and both of us ended up getting a little sun: not enough to hurt (and it's already faded, except for a very stark stripe across my right bicep) but enough to remind us that summer is coming. We went next to the Boardwalk. Poor Lance becomes frightened by too much excitement and noise, and this was the busiest we've ever had him on the Boardwalk. He is particularly frightened of people on skateboards, especially since, when we were there in February, there was a guy dressed in a blue Grateful Dead bear outfit that kept skateboarding past and terrified poor Lance. We had dinner reservations at 7 and so decided to have a snack while on the Boardwalk, so I held the Goldens on a bench, and Lance jumped up next to me and curled into a little ball as much behind my body as he could manage. People kept coming by, seeing Alex and exclaiming over him, followed immediately by, "Aww, there's another one!" when they saw Lance wedged in beside me.

( Read more... )

We returned home from England last night in an experience that I'm not eager to repeat anytime soon: We flew home in the middle of a snowstorm! The East Coast has been hit with quite a whallop of a snowstorm, and while we didn't get hit nearly as hard as people did further north, we did end up with a few inches, and it was in full swing when the plane came down.

It was very weird. We were descending through seemingly endless clouds; it was so thick that we could barely see the light on the wing. Then ... the clouds broke and we were over the runway, with the lights from the airport coming up out of the dark. About ten seconds later, we plunked onto the ground. The runway was completely snow-covered, which was rather ... disturbing. I always assumed they cleared the snow before allowing planes to land.

The flight was pretty good, although there was understandably some turbulence. Right in the middle of the tea/coffee service, the plane started jostling up and down enough that my still-very-hot cup of tea started sloshing all over, which was not good.

My inlaws came to pick us up from the airport. We had originally purchased tickets to return on New Year's Day to Baltimore-Washington International, which is the nearest airport to us; a day after we bought our tickets, that flight was cancelled and we were rebooked on a next-day flight to *cue ominous music* Dulles International Airport. Washington, DC, has three local airports. Travel tip from a local: If at all possible, fly into BWI or Reagan. Dulles sucks. It's like it exists in a self-contained pocket of gray existential sadness. It looks like a warehouse, everyone who works there is pissy or miserable or both, and as a result, it is ridiculously inefficient. The nicest people we dealt with were the Border Patrol agents and the British Airways representative. Even the Christmas decorations looked sad as shit.

My sister--who has also had negative experiences at Dulles--told me that you start out in a moving room to get from terminal to terminal. I was like o.O, but she was right: The shuttles are not buses in the usual sense; they are large boxes--yes, as big as a midsized room--and if you thought something that large would be more stabilized and offer a smoother, more comfortable ride, then you would be wrong, because you are at Dulles, and nothing is smooth or comfortable there. After being herded into one of these boxes by an unsmiling and irritable Dulles employee, we were shuttled across the snow-covered tarmac while the driver blared the horn all the while (because, apparently, the people who drive the little luggage trains and such wouldn't otherwise see the giant, rolling box careening towards them) and I clung to a pole inside for dear life. At the baggage claim, when half of the luggage was unloaded, the conveyor belts suddenly stopped and apparently there was no one downstairs to fix them, so the employee who was exuberantly slamming suitcases from laying flat to laying on their sides crawled down the conveyor belt, was missing for a few minutes, and then crawled back up. Of course, no one was told what was happening, so a bunch of us who hadn't received all of our luggage came to the conclusion that it was lost and reported to the BA desk, at which point we were given the comforting news that, no, our luggage made it just fine, it was just that no one could find the people who were supposed to be in the baggage loading area to do things like fix the conveyor belt, so the people who had been hired to slam luggage from one position to another had to do it instead.

When we finally left the airport, it was snowing something fierce. Driving on the Capitol Beltway is harrowing under the best of conditions--a recent study by Allstate insurance found that DC drivers get into accidents at roughly twice the rate of the national average--and was super-fun in heavy snow. By now it was about 10ish--our flight having arrived at 8:15--and my brain was telling me that it was 3 AM. It is about an hour's drive from Dulles to my inlaws' house, but it took quite a bit longer. The roads were in awful shape, even the major highways. It was about midnight by the time we arrived at my inlaws' house, and Bobby and I decided that a middle-of-the-night journey an hour further northward through the dark, unplowed country roads of Carroll County was not a wise course of action, so we spent the night at my inlaws' and drove home early this morning.

Despite not getting into bed until after midnight, we were both wide awake by 6 AM--oh, the wonders of traveling east to west! Getting up early is briefly and blissfully easy! We were both due to go back to work, but by 6 AM, the good news was already posted: Schools were closed for the day! We both very much needed the extra day off. Bobby said tonight that he didn't know how we'd lucked out so well. The best he could think of is that we got on Jesus's good side for visiting so many cathedrals and old churches in England and France.

By the time we drove home to Manchester this morning, the highways were clear but the side roads were touch-and-go. The streets in our neighborhood had been plowed but not salted; in fact, our street still looks pretty crappy and is mostly still snow-covered. We only got about 4 inches/10 cm out of this storm, so I'm not sure why it was so hard to clear when I've seen twice that amount cleared out by early afternoon.

We are expected to have the lowest temperatures we've had since 1994 (which I remember well, since I was in seventh grade and the school where I went made us stand outside for 20 minutes every morning before letting us in, and I remember my bones just aching relentlessly that year). Right now, it is 10F/-12C outside; we have a fire roaring in the woodstove, but my hands are freezing and feel like they've been all day. We're also expected to get more snow in the week to come.

I have pictures and travelogues to post from our excursions around England, and I hope to get those posted this weekend.

... than Ocean City, Maryland, on a sunny day, in the low 80s F, with a brisk breeze blowing off the sea.

We arrived yesterday, having left Manchester at about 8 in the morning. We dropped the Goldens off at Bobby's parents' house the night before, so all we had to do was pack the car and hit the road.

It rained sporadically the whole way down, until we got about a half-hour out of OC--it takes us about three-and-a-half hours from Manchester--and then it was bright and sunny and beautiful. We got into town at about noon, stopped at Piezano's for lunch--they have the best pizza in the world, with the sauce on top of the cheese, as weird as that sounds--and then strolled around the Dew Tour, which was this weekend. The room wasn't ready, so we sat on the beach until evening.

It is hot in the sun but there is a strong breeze coming off the ocean that actually makes it a little chilly to sit in the shade of an umbrella on the beach. In other words, perfect beach weather. As I told Bobby, if I can moderate my temperature just by sticking a leg out into the sun, versus having to go out into the ocean, which is the only way to cool off later in the season, then that's perfect in my mind!

We drove across the bridge to West Ocean City for dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant in OC, La Hacienda. There used to be a La Hacienda in Ocean City, but it closed; thankfully, it has a sister restaurant in Ocean Pines. They have an outdoor deck-bar, and there was a bona fide bar fight. We were sitting by the window overlooking the pond and the deck and so got to see the whole thing. It felt like being at work! The male server, who was about 18 years old, and the busboy, who was about 16, broke it up, so just like at work, it was probably more of a show put on in a safe place where the fighters knew they wouldn't actually be hurt before someone broke it up. (Our students are fond of waiting to fight until there are about a half-dozen of the biggest male staff in the room.) The manager told us that these people come in and cause drama frequently. She said she never saw the kind of drama at the OC restaurant that she sees since moving to the sleepy Ocean Pines' restaurant!

Last night, we walked about two miles on the Boardwalk, got on the ferris wheel, and went out on the pier (rebuilt since Hurricane Sandy took about a third of it) and watched a fishing boat come in and people catch various things off the pier. It is amusing and sad to go out onto the OC pier when people are actually catching things because their "knowledge" of sea life is so wrongheaded that it'd be comic if that ignorance didn't lead to people doing dumb things. The waters around OC are full of skates, which become stingrays--and therefore dangerous--in the minds of most people. Oh, and horseshoe crabs have a stinger as well. I was surprised to learn this, as was the horseshoe crab that got hooked on the pier last night.

Today we did lunch at Brass Balls and a long day on the beach. I am almost finished A Feast for Crows by GRRM. It's the usual GRRM: entertaining as all get-out at times, not very well written (if I read the phrase "fearsomely strong cider" one more time or if some overweight character "puffs" one more time, I might chuck the book into the sea), and punctuated by long dissertations on the various movements and goings-on of minor lords. GRRM really is an artist when it comes to random interval positive reinforcement. Just when you think you can't bear to read another account of how various minor characters are related to each other or another heraldic description, then he'll come out with something truly shocking and keep those pages turning.

Off to supper at a new restaurant now and back to the Boards for arcade games tonight!

Monday, April 1, the day after the Grand Canyon trip, was pretty low-key. Luxor had just opened a Titanic exhibit that Bobby and I went to see in the afternoon. Okay, okay, go ahead and laugh: Titanic was possibly my first fandom, unless one counts playing Hey Dude with my sister when we were kids. The Titanic movie came out when I was sixteen, and while my classmates were mooning over Jack and Rose, I became fascinated by the history, which spurred a spate of book purchases and the construction of a website (that never made it to the web) in Microsoft Front Page ... so yeah, sixteen-year-old me is a lot like current me it seems.

The Titanic exhibit was really good: a display of various artifacts brought up from the ship, coupled with, of course, a description of the ship's brief life and profiles of various passengers. It was informative without verging into being pedantic and blended the various threads of the story very well to keep it interesting. The exhibit had reconstructions of parts of the ship (including the grand staircase that pretty much anyone who's seen the movie remembers) that were really cool for a one-time nerd about this stuff like me. There was a poignant irony in the survival of so many delicate things--porcelain cups, letters, clothing, delicate jewelry--brought up from the deep after a hundred years, in a disaster where so many people died. The showpiece was the "Big Piece," a large section from the side of the ship. I hadn't realized that the ship is decaying so quickly now that no trace of it may remain in as few as a couple of decades.

Photos weren't allowed, so you don't get pictures of all of this stuff!

Luxor is the Egyptian-themed hotel-casino. The decor was very cool, but the people were very pushy and annoying. We discovered, as we journeyed in and out of the various hotel-casinos, that some of them have legions of employees devoted to trying to convince you to go to "free" shows and meals--I put "free" in quotes because I'm not so dumb to think that there isn't a gimmick, especially in Vegas--and it's nothing to be accosted by one of these people every few minutes while strolling around or heading to a particular place. It had the effect of making Bobby and me not want to go back, if we could help it; Bobby was going to go play over at Luxor, since it was basically across the street from the Tropicana, but decided against it because of the pushiness of the people there.

Here it is.



( Rest of Diary for April 1 & 2 and Pictures below the Cut )

This semester has been really intense, so I have not been writing in my journal and, therefore, I don't think I ever mentioned that we were going to Vegas for Spring Break. My dad turned 70 on his last birthday, and I think this had some sort of goading effect on him, as in he realized that he doesn't have all the time in the world to do various things that he wants to do; my grandmother (his mom) only decided she wanted to travel once she was too infirm to do so. Anyway, long story short, my parents invited Bobby and me to go with them to Vegas for Spring Break, so here we are.

The funny thing is that, when I was a kid, Vegas was constantly held over us as the crowning achievement in vacations, always set for next year. Next year, next year ... considering that, prior to about 1:30 PM EST yesterday, the furthest west I'd been was West Virginia, next year never came then, but I guess it finally has now.

The flight was uneventful. Our past few flights have been to Europe, and it's seemingly impossible to get a flight from the east coast U.S. to Europe that doesn't leave at night, so it was nice to fly during the day for once, rather than trying unsuccessfully to sleep and arriving exhausted. The highlight of the flight was flying over the Grand Canyon and the desert more generally. I loved the desert as a kid (in my imagination since, as noted above, "next year" never came!) and the closest I've come to this point is the dry forest in southern Puerto Rico. The middle "flyover" states were pretty uneventful except that the roads were very, very straight, and I was in the midst of thinking that the world looks pretty much the same everywhere from the air when the landscape began to change, and the earth went brown and then red, with the mesas sketched in long, graceful curves, the stretches of red-brown land occasionally broken by mountains, some of them with snow at the tops. Then the Grand Canyon, which was ... grand.

Vegas looks pretty much like it does on movies and TV. This is going to be an interesting experience, for the people-watching alone. After we arrived last night, we had dinner reservations and tickets to see the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show Love. I was tired from the week leading up to our departure, which was crammed with preparing for a week's absence from my various obligations, and already footsore and hungry, being as it was hours past suppertime by my mental clock. It was only a two-block walk, according to Dad; Bobby and I, never having been here before, took him at his word. It wasn't a two-block walk; it was almost a two-mile walk that made us late for our dinner reservation, to say nothing of the fact that I had no energy for such a walk, and my feet were dead by the time we got there. I love walking places--I think it's the best way to get to know a place--but last night was not the night for it.

The show was great. There were two young men two rows in front of us who looked like Beavis and Butthead and showed up drunk with huge drinks in their hands who got kicked out after the one passed out in his seat. It's Vegas, I guess! Given the costs of show tickets, though, to say nothing of the probable cost of those drinks, that was an expensive no-shit story to tell their friends, if getting kicked out of a Cirque du Soleil show is worth bragging about. I guess to some people it is! It definitely added a little something to the show, especially considering that a theme in the show was challenging authority, so there are hippies on the stage being accosted by cops in riot gear, while two kids that look like Beavis and Butthead are being dragged up the steps by a blond woman in a business suit. An interesting contrast and sad commentary on the rebellious nature of my generation!

Then we took a cab back to the hotel.

It is now a little after nine. I have pruned by email inbox and answered/handled what I must; Bobby is snowboarding today. He would find a place to go snowboarding in the desert! So I'm with my parents all day today. I'm going to call them now to see about breakfast, then plan to spend the day by the pool, but before anyone gets too excited that I'm loosening up in the sin-saturated desert climate of Las Vegas, Nevada, I'll be reading for grad school while I do. I did get all of my writing assignments done, so I won't have to write while I'm here, but the reading is unavoidable.