Vacation, Day 3

A few observations:

Building sand castles is more work than it sounds like it would be, especially when the site foreman is my neice. She's a taskmaster, even if the buckets are shaped to make turrets that look precisely like a castle with steps & everything.

Those red flags were out yesterday. I tried to explain that those are really more of a guideline than a rule. For some, they mean stay out of the water. For others, they mean it'll be some of the best fun you've had in the ocean in years.

I don't get the beachcomber with a metal detector. I mean, how much could they possibly find that results in that activity being worth their while? It looks an awful lot like work to me.

For some reason, I enjoy those extra-large beach-type places with names like Souvenir City. One had a shark mouth (complete with teeth on hinges, to which people that could reach them ignored them and kids who couldn't reach them tried to jump--still not quite there--to make them swivel) as an entrance and the other an overgrown octopus (nothing swiviled that I could tell). They sell everything from the normal stuff you'd need at the beach to shells to pet hermit crabs to clothing to something called "SmackWear" in which there were t-shirts with all sorts of put-downs of Auburn & Alabama.

There must be some sound the henna tattoo machine makes that lures the 10-14 year old crowd--and only they can hear it because I didn't see anybody outside that range getting one. There was a steady stream around the stand...about 6 or 7 per hour, each one throwing down $15 to $25 bucks.

Nearly every restaurant has an outdoor deck featuring live music, which mostly means some folk singer with a guitar auditioned & got the gig. I think they all have some rendition of "Sweet Home Alabama" and a country song that mentions that they were singing "Sweet Home Alabama" in their repertoire.

I could jacuzz for hours if no one else was in the pool area. It's hard to enjoy the peace & quiet with the cannonball competition going on off the edge of the hot tub.

The iPhone's new software & applications can keep folks interested and happy for a couple of hours.

My friend Mikey doesn't understand that my mind constantly is providing ongoing commentary about the world around me, and that if I don't unload some of it via blog (it'd all go in a journal, anyway) then there'd be no way I could relax and enjoy my days off. This activity actually slows that mental process down.