When I don't post...
...it's a good bet that I'm taking care of the family needs.
Most importantly, the need to get the heck away from Dodge...erm, Bleckley...for a while.
Kristin and the girls and I decided to drive south for Labor Day weekend, almost randomly towards the Gulf Coast. There was direction to our travels, but only just. Wandering around St Marks was keeno (although the naturalist in me wanted to explore the rivers a bit more), and the utter highlight of the trip (for me) was wandering out to the St Marks lighthouse, looking at the plantlife on the levee, and coming across a host of crabs - there must have been at least 200 - that were raising and lowering their arms very deliberately. You wouldn't think that crabs would be such an awesome sight, but there it is.
(I tried to take a picture. Hopefully it turns out.)
We also saw Cedar Key (and if we want to run around the islands beyond there, we'd have to plan things out better), and then got the girls and me some swimming time at Manatee Springs. By the way, Manatee Springs is cold.
Here's what's still bugging me about the trip - we were spontaneous. Completely and totally spontaneous. Which is fine. Kristin and I did our honeymoon - to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, even - completely spontaneous, and we wound up taking hotel rooms 80 miles or so away from the park for a couple of nights. But, of course, it is a totally dangerous thing to do a Labor Day weekend thing so spontaneous. So that at 9:00 in the evening, I was burning up the cell phone lines trying to find us a hotel room.
(By the way, I now appreciate cell phones a ton. And my provider even more. Wandered all over south Florida backwoods, never lost signal completely. Not once. Plug, plug, plug.)
So, everything there is fine, and not bothering me, and stuff. But then Sunday afternoon, on our way home, I decide that I'm going to find Kristin someplace to eat and make her happy. I pull off the interstate in Valdosta, and I drive through Valdosta looking for a place - while Kristin is napping on the passenger's side most of the time. I spend probably 15 minutes doing a bit of wandering around Valdosta, not finding exactly the type of place I'm looking for, heading back towards the interstate, when I get there being surpised at the options I find and making a split-second decision...
...and then I'm back on north-bound I-75 with five miles to the next exit and no good way to turn back around and go back to what I did find around Valdosta. I get the feeling that I spent 15 mintues wandering when I could have gotten this far on the interstate in four. And I'm crushed by that. I mean, utter deep depression-inducing stuff that I'm not sure I've gotten over yet.
The good news is, I started talking to Kristin about it immediately, which proves to be a good hedge against I-suck-I'm-useless-I-hate-myself type stuff. And we analyse it to death (if you have any suggestions about why I might have started feeling that way, don't worry, Kristin and I have already had that idea). But it still gets me that we had spent the better part of two hours wandering about Central Florida the night before looking and calling for a hotel room and it didn't bug me for beans, and then I spend 15 minutes looking around Valdosta for a place to eat (even when I wasn't terribly hungry) and...crash.
And I still feel a bit from it.
But the week is starting (even if a day late), and we'll see how it goes from here.
Most importantly, the need to get the heck away from Dodge...erm, Bleckley...for a while.
Kristin and the girls and I decided to drive south for Labor Day weekend, almost randomly towards the Gulf Coast. There was direction to our travels, but only just. Wandering around St Marks was keeno (although the naturalist in me wanted to explore the rivers a bit more), and the utter highlight of the trip (for me) was wandering out to the St Marks lighthouse, looking at the plantlife on the levee, and coming across a host of crabs - there must have been at least 200 - that were raising and lowering their arms very deliberately. You wouldn't think that crabs would be such an awesome sight, but there it is.
(I tried to take a picture. Hopefully it turns out.)
We also saw Cedar Key (and if we want to run around the islands beyond there, we'd have to plan things out better), and then got the girls and me some swimming time at Manatee Springs. By the way, Manatee Springs is cold.
Here's what's still bugging me about the trip - we were spontaneous. Completely and totally spontaneous. Which is fine. Kristin and I did our honeymoon - to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor, even - completely spontaneous, and we wound up taking hotel rooms 80 miles or so away from the park for a couple of nights. But, of course, it is a totally dangerous thing to do a Labor Day weekend thing so spontaneous. So that at 9:00 in the evening, I was burning up the cell phone lines trying to find us a hotel room.
(By the way, I now appreciate cell phones a ton. And my provider even more. Wandered all over south Florida backwoods, never lost signal completely. Not once. Plug, plug, plug.)
So, everything there is fine, and not bothering me, and stuff. But then Sunday afternoon, on our way home, I decide that I'm going to find Kristin someplace to eat and make her happy. I pull off the interstate in Valdosta, and I drive through Valdosta looking for a place - while Kristin is napping on the passenger's side most of the time. I spend probably 15 minutes doing a bit of wandering around Valdosta, not finding exactly the type of place I'm looking for, heading back towards the interstate, when I get there being surpised at the options I find and making a split-second decision...
...and then I'm back on north-bound I-75 with five miles to the next exit and no good way to turn back around and go back to what I did find around Valdosta. I get the feeling that I spent 15 mintues wandering when I could have gotten this far on the interstate in four. And I'm crushed by that. I mean, utter deep depression-inducing stuff that I'm not sure I've gotten over yet.
The good news is, I started talking to Kristin about it immediately, which proves to be a good hedge against I-suck-I'm-useless-I-hate-myself type stuff. And we analyse it to death (if you have any suggestions about why I might have started feeling that way, don't worry, Kristin and I have already had that idea). But it still gets me that we had spent the better part of two hours wandering about Central Florida the night before looking and calling for a hotel room and it didn't bug me for beans, and then I spend 15 minutes looking around Valdosta for a place to eat (even when I wasn't terribly hungry) and...crash.
And I still feel a bit from it.
But the week is starting (even if a day late), and we'll see how it goes from here.