scenes from the beach...

Was a gorgeous day for beaching today. On paper we had a kickass crew of vball nuts - Jackie, Keri, and Sara - ready to play all afternoon, but in practice, we were all coming out of a pretty volleyball-full weekend, and were perhaps feeling it a bit. Out of the past three days at the beach, today was also definitely the sunniest and the only one to drive us to actually sock up to protect our feet from blistering hot sand.

Funny how I can't recall seeing the pros shaking sand out of their winter boot socks between plays. They must play on cooler sand I guess...





Would YOU clean your bathtub with SANDPAPER? Of course not!


I always end up bringing some Nahant back home with me... =)

I'd scheduled us to start up today at 1 in the afternoon, when I usually try to rally people to the beach by 10.30am. I figured that because today was a non-holiday Monday and part of a 4-day weekend, most people would be out of town or at the office, leaving the beach to us, and there'd be no cause for traffic or parking issues.

My badd.

I left home just a bit after noon, shooting to get to Nahant in time to set up a net by 1. Once on route 16, I kept hitting these packs of slow-moving traffic, and what seemed like EVERY frickin frackin red light until the beach. I survived all that, listening to my summer driving-to-the-beach mixx prototype, only to sit for 15 minutes or so in line on the highway strip leading to the parking lot. The attendants were closing and re-opening the lot gate every couple minutes, and the line creeped along accordingly.

Lucky for us, Sara had hit the beach earlier in the morning. Sharp girl, that one. She's gonna go far. Keri was a few minutes ahead of me in line, and when I finally got past the gate, it was a Good Thing to have a couple of advance agents on the inside to help stake a court-sized claim and shuttle all the net gear from the parking strip to the beach. Jackie followed shortly and our little volleyball-a-palooza got under way.

A beautiful day at the beach shared with some fine company. No volleyball playing fellow - no fellow, period, really - could rightly complain. Alas, if only I could've wrangled another player or two so that we could play and sit and play again, and kill ourselves over a longer period of time. =)

Now, why can't I get "Don't Stop Believing" out of my head...?

Heh.

(Actually, I have that on one of my other summer driving mixxes. Maybe I'll pull that out of the cd wallet in the car this coming weekend. =)

Frack. The weather forecast for tomorrow looks craptacular. I told the Angels* at the beach (yeah, you might think that would make me Charlie, but who am I kidding? I'm more of a Bosley, bleah) that I was calling off the beach trip for tomorrow and would try to mobilize a grass or sandbox outing. Without a holiday crowd to beat, we could start in the afternoon, people could sleep late for America's birthday, and everyone would be closer to town for whatever other July 4th shenanigans they might have going on.

Well, I'll hafta figure that out...

After I get some workywork done...

One sorta sad little thing... Three days at the beach, and none of them chased with our traditional trip to Wendy's. Altho "Frostee points" were featured in the scoring of the last matches of Saturday and Sunday (thanks, Steve =), heh.

Keep on keepin on~

* Rest in melodramatic peace, Aaron S.

p.s. Donna Martin graduates! Donna Martin graduates!