Sandy Toes Diary

Dear Friends and Family,
If people cruise by your home yelling, “Waaaahoo!” then summer is in high gear. Many schools start back in August, so loads of families are taking their vacations in July, and the Gulf shore is their destination for a crazy, lazy, hazy, week of summer fun. Living at ground zero of vacationville has its drawbacks. In my aerobics class the gals were complaining about how they couldn’t go shopping on Sunday because the traffic is so bad. Duh. We just moved here and we figured out fast you don’t go anywhere on the weekends. I get a kick out of watching the tourists take their pictures in front of everything “island” and feel a bit smug about being a “local”. I also gladly give directions to the myriad of cars that pull over whilst I am puttering in the front yard or garage. The thing that saddens me is the copious amount of litter the tourist’s thoughtlessly leave behind on the roads and beach. I hope our town has a plan for cleaning up this trash.
The weather is sooooo summertime. How many words for hot can you think of? Well the weatherman earns his pay with these astute predictions. Lets look at today’s "Corpus Christi Caller Times" for our weekly forecast. Lets see, Wednesday: hot and humid. Thursday: hot and sticky. Friday: sauna like. Saturday: sweltering. Sunday: Baking hot. Wow, in Cleveland we never got baking hot or sweltering. Sounds like I should do my baking on Sunday. Being on the island by the ocean we do get a few degrees cooler with the constant ocean breeze. In fact, we go to the beach just before sundown and it is rather pleasant. At the beach Doug is practicing flying his training kite. He is training for kite surfing, which I will again agree to watch so I can dial 911 and tell the Coast Guard exactly where to start looking.
New things: I started swimming daily at our beautiful community pool. It is a good workout and you don’t sweat. I also go to a morning step class (7:30am!!) about twice a week where I really sweat. We recently got Molly a doggy life jacket to see if she would venture out into the deeper surf with us. Nope. She must know about the law of the ocean; it is a giant food chain. There are things in the ocean that will sting you (jelly fish and sting rays) and eat you (sharks), no questions asked. We go heedlessly in to play in the rolling waves, but Molly prudently stays close to shore. Doug now has a WaterRower. This is a rowing machine that uses water for resistance and makes sounds like one is rowing. Boy, now he is he really going to get buff. It looked like he got a good workout just pulling it the stairs and putting it together. Doug got the weather station working again. He had to reconstruct all systems after a major meltdown on two computers. Therefore, the Deck Cam is off the air until next week or never, according to our technical staff. So that’s about it until next time.
Stay cool and Bar-be-cue, Yours Truly, JanisTITLE: Issue 12

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Dear Friends and Family,
A picture is worth a thousand words. I have attached some recent shots of us doing our thing. We went to a great gourmet restaurant in Rockport and took our picture there. Doug pulled the seat out of his car because it was broken so we joked about using an orange crate for a seat...he looks ready to drive to an Amway meeting. Fourth of July evening we sat on lawn chairs outside our garage and had drinks, listened to the crickets, watched the town fireworks and got bit up by mosquitos, a perfect summer night. We just bought Molly a doggy life preserver so she can go swimming with us at the beach. We also just got a kite for Doug. So we are off to the beach for some fun.
That's all for this week, It's summer, have fun..
Janis

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Dear Friends and Family,
Happy Fourth of JULY! It is nuts on the island today, so we are hunkered down and waiting for the 5th of July to go anywhere. We did go to church today and the joke was that the Pastor had been on vacation. When you live in a vacation destination where do you go for a vacation?
I have much to tell you. First, the Deck Cam is not working and the weather station is not updating because two of Doug’s computers died. He is in his laboratory now putting new parts in trying to bring them back to life. So all the exciting stuff on our web site is not so exciting right now. Please be patient and check back.
Remember back when I was raving about all the birds? It turns out that this area is truly the birdiest. Here is a quote from the paper, “Corpus Christi, for the second consecutive time, has won bragging rights as America’s Birdiest City, beating out such cities as San Diego, Calif., and New York…The competition’s purpose is to see which cities can document the highest count of bird species during a selected 24-hour period. Corpus Christi’s bird team located 246 species this year, beating last year’s number of 228. Second-best Sand Diego spotted 209 bird species, and New York City came in third with 190. Philip Pryde, a retired San Diego State University professor, started the contest four years ago to gain bragging rights for Sand Diego. New York won the first year. In 2002, San Diego earned the title. The Corpus Christi birding team took the honors in 2003 and 2004, winning two of the three times they have competed.”
It is wonderful to be surrounded by so much natural beauty. We have a family of Whistling Ducks and ducklings in our Lake that we watch from our living room. We also have two Moorhens that will paddle up to our deck to get fish chow to take to their little ones in the reeds. The latest new creature I have run into is the “butterfly of death”. It is a giant moth migrating from Mexico. Know as the black witch moth in the United States it is surround with superstitions. It has an average 6-inch wingspan and is often mistaken for a bat which is exactly what I thought when I surprised one Monday morning from my bushes.
Finally, I am giving all my friends in Cleveland advance warning that we are planning to return for the first two weeks of October. So we will be there for Claire’s birthday and Heather’s Bat Mitzvah and any other parties we get wind of.
That’s all the news that is the news for now. May God bless you with boldness in his name. All my love,
JanisJanisJanis-----
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