2015
saved by zero
maura @ 3:36 pm
I still like to have a paper calendar hanging near my desk, and this year it’s a free calendar from the Nature Conservancy (well, I guess I made a donation at one point, so it’s not really free). August’s calendar models were three adorable sandpipers on the beach. For some reason their cute little faces and bright orange feet were honestly captivating to me, and I haven’t yet found the will to turn over the calendar to September (a cool foresty brown bear).
We haven’t been to the beach in a while. I really, really dislike sand, I was so very relieved when the kid finally outgrew sandboxes. I also am not the biggest fan of sunscreen, much as I realize that it’s an absolute necessity for someone as fluorescently pale as I am. The sand + sunscreen combo I find particularly yucky, as I’m sure most people do. But I do like the ocean a lot, both for swimming (much much more awesome than swimming in pools) and for looking/listening. And the sand always *looks* nice, too.
When the kid was littler we often went to the beach with my family during the summer. It was typically a fun, chaotic, energetic time — lots of little kids + sand + sea + vacation food will be that way. The kind of vacation you kind of feel like you need another vacation to recover from. And while I like the relative calm of vacationing with a teenager now, I kind of miss those beach vacations. The last week of August — this past week — was often when we’d go, lots of kids are in school by now so the rental prices have gone down. But with the kids getting older and all of my nieces and nephews now starting school before the NYC public schools (which don’t start til next Wednesday), it’s been to hard to plan a big beach trip in recent years. It’s a bad week for me work-wise, too, as CUNY has typically started by then.
One thing that seems more of a boring grownup thing that I like is visiting the beach on the off season. No swimming, of course, but still lots to love about being near the ocean. The kind of vacation that might be easier with a teenager. Perhaps we’ll test out that theory this year.
