August Doings

Busy busy busy here. Better busy than not, idle hands and devil’s work and all.

On the 3rd the girls and I and the Mrs. drove down to Hilton Head, South Carolina for our annual summer pilgrimage. The trip down took most of the day, fourteen hours. We left around 6:30 am and arrived on the island at 8:30 pm, me taking driving shift one and three for nine hours total and the wife the middle shift for five. Once there, famished, we stopped at the wonderfully named café “World of Beer.” I had me two delicious ice cold IPAs, perfect complement to the southern humidity and hospitality as the skies darkened and the silvery sliver of the moon lit up Broad Creek, the waters that divide Hilton Head in two.

The next six days were insanely active with insane activities. We kayaked for two hours up and down the Creek, alert for dolphins and birds of prey. The girls and I rented bikes (Little One and I on a tandem – a bicycle built for two, Patch on a solo) and bi-, tri-, and quadrisected the island in search of a notable thrift shop over the course of a long afternoon. Patch and mom paddle-boarded while I hounded the docks, photographing them going out and coming in, then trying to keep my sunburnt hide out of trouble. Overall I downed a dozen Coronas and a dozen local IPAs. We ate like royalty. We also began each day with a 2-3 mile hike.

I had the best fish tacos of my life Wednesday afternoon.

Books! I brought my stash of Very Short Introductions but only got through one – Galaxies. Extremely interesting, and re-kindled my interest in astronomy. Why Galaxies? Well, on our balcony, overlooking the marsh and the creek, shone the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, and Polaris, with all its constellations in pinwheelish array. The moon was waxing from New to First Quarter, and light pollution was a minimum upon the waters, so the stars glimmered bright and jewel-like.

I also finished Galaxy in Flames, book three of a 51-book series Patch discovered for me last year, a wonderfully non-PC science fiction military epic taking places some 30 centuries in the future. So non-PC I feel it should be outlawed. (Probably will at the rate society’s slipping.) More about that, as well as the book series, in future posts.

Getting away from the whole “Galaxy” theme, I also picked up and read James Michener’s The Bridges of Toko-ri from the library’s book sale. A slim 112 pages, I put it away in two hours. Well worth it, A+, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I highly recommend it. Engrossing, nerve-wracking, touching, a tale of the Korean War, when men were still men and the women were still women, and communism was still bad. Loved it, and it struck a chord with me. Maybe I’ll search out the movie when it plays next on TCM.

At our rental there was a bookshelf with a card – “IF YOU TAKE A BOOK PLEASE LEAVE A BOOK”. So I left Toko-ri, and took Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne. This was a gnarled ancient paperback that I would have bought off the Bookmobile as a youngling, a novel by Verne I’ve never heard of before. It details the dangerous journey of a woodsman trekking the Siberian wastes with a desperate letter from the Czar and rebels on his heels. Oh, and once we did find that thrift shop I bought two more paperbacks – The Prisoner of Zenda, which I read over a couple of hours, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Worlds of 2001, his take on what Space Odyssey means, which I’ll read later this September.

My mother-in-law, a gourmet chef, cooked us swordfish steak one night, regular steak another, and then a fou-fou cheese macaroni dish to wow the girls. Little One impressed her Nana by cooking a chicken and pasta dish she’s been working on. We watched Cubs and Yankees games in the evening on her MLB network, and watched fireworks from our balcony mid-week. We swam in two different pools and lounged in a hot tub. The girls went to the beach to dip their toes in the Atlantic. I stayed behind, and was rewarded with a near-beheading as a 4 x 5 foot twenty-five pound framed glass picture above the door to our place unexpectedly dropped ten feet off the hook to the floor. But despite this and some radioactive-like sun damage on the legs, all in all, a good time was had by all.

Got back and after a recovery day Sunday had to process payroll at my day job. Lost a full day-and-a-half of prep, so that was quite stressful. I put in four hours OT which they don’t pay, which means later in the week I get to leave early. Then, last night, my first tax meeting with the night job. Man, these four months blew by like c. (That’s a physics reference.) I got my scorecard for last year’s performance and a map of what preseason Tax Season 20 looks like. Ugh. But I should make some decent money.

So, friends, that’s the August doings. More stuff, soon.