The Last Full Day

There was another false start today. We were told that we'd probably wake up early to go boating, but my dad ended up getting a boat reserved later - at 12:30, so we were allowed to sleep in for a while. At something like 8:30 I detected that something wasn't going to plan so I got up and asked my parents what was going on, informed them I was taking their bed, was informed I would be disturbed, and slept comfortably in a marshmallow until sometime around 10.

Then we just hung around until it was time to go. I had Cheerios, which is the only type of cereal we have. The bowls are very deep and always have way more milk in them than you think when you are done.

I've been entertaining myself in my down time here by reading a topic on the SomethingAwful formus I post at. It's title is "Creepy reads on Wikipedia," and it has people bringing up things anywhere from serial killers to unexplained sounds to things like Cossart to outsider art. By far the most interesting thing that was there was Henry Darger, the most celebrated example of "Outsider Art" there is. You should read the abstract of that Wikipedia article. Seriously, read it. Now.

Congratulations on reading it! Anyhow, I spent a LOT of time reading about all those things. Very informative, though not sure it was worth probably the 4 hours or so to read about all of them.

Anyhow, we went to the Marriott to get our boat (that's where the dock was). We stopped at a convenience store on the way. A guy in a truck that was towing some sort of trailer almost destoyed the car we were in while we were in the parking lot. I got a doughnut which was marked Krispy Kreme but was definitely from Dunkin - a disappointment. My brother and I carried the large blue cooler down the very long dock when we got there, and it took a long time to actually get out of the dock. There was another family there and it seemed they were all renting waverunners. The prep work on our boat wasn't all done by the time we got there and apparently the man that we communicated with had to put some oil in our boat before we set out.

We went out and got to fishing. I didn't really feel like fishing, so I just chilled out with my aviators on and didn't do a whole lot. They caught some small fish - Ryan caught a tiny little one. Then they caught some Jack - possibly the same fish twice? And we also caught some catfish, and they made strange sounds (so did the Jack). We tried a new spot after we drifted down our first path a few times, and we saw porpoises jumping (!) which was pretty cool. There were also other fishing jumping, more in the distance, however. There were a lot of porpoises and they seemed to get pretty close to our boat, but never closer than about 50 feet. Jessica was afraid we would catch one. She was also afraid that we all texted too much and that I wasn't actually a great photographer.

I saw a huge fish jump at the point of land near us at one point and told my dad, and he drove over there. We drifted down that once or maybe twice and caught some fish, my dad thought one was a Pompano but it was just a Jack again. At one point a Jack jumped very close to our boat, in and out of the water twice, the first longer than the second, probably about ten feet horizontal and then about four. It was surprising and I happened to catch it.

My mom made me take a picture of palm trees in our complex earlier because they "look like a mom and pop and child." She also made me take pictures of everyone on the boat, so I took really bad pictures on purpose, and then my sister and mom tried to take good ones, I'm not really sure which are which right now, oh well!

My mom wanted my dad to go somewhere crazy for not a very good reason and we kept running on shallow ground. The first time it was about to happen Ryan said, "You're about to run aground" and then my dad ran aground and was surprised and Ryan said, "Geez, someone should have said something." This happened multiple times and we gave up. We stopped to fly fish for a minute on the way back because we saw two people on one boat with a fish on at the same time, but I don't think we had any luck. There was another boat at our dock when we got back, so we waited a few minutes before pulling in.

There were two girls at the dock that were from the family renting waverunners from before. I was confused why they were there. The rest of the family wasn't there, and one of them had changed clothes but the other hadn't. Were they renting waverunners again on their own? I dunno. My brother and I took the cooler back and we all used the bathroom and drove back to the apartment. I took a shower and read about creepy things. I also had to look up weather for my mom (it will be windy but I lied so she wouldn't freak out) and order pizza from Papa John's because my brother and I didn't feel like Chinese (neither did my dad but he dealt with it). The guy from PJ's said it was very confusing here even for a New Yorker, and I agreed. His name was Doug and he made 3 deliveries, per the receipt.

We went to David's house for dinner again. I couldn't not-touch the guitar anymore, so I asked Wendy if I could touch it, tuned it a tiny bit and played it (I'm not very good though). Everyone else sat down for dinner, but Ryan and I were exiled because we already ate and there wasn't enough room. He watched Two and a Half Men and I read The Great Gatsby, which David is reading to Lucien. He tried it, at least, and said he also read "Be Prepared" to him, which is like a Boy Scouts guide of what to expect for a male who's about to become a parent. It referred to infant behavior that seems contrary to survival instinct as "a sort of baby-version of Jackass." (i.e. flying down stairs, sticking things in sockets, laying face down in every water source possible).

I joined the dinner table after some people left and Jess was mad that I didn't help clean up. I asked Dave about his reading to Lucien and he showed me Be Prepared. I think I went back to the TV area after that and listened to Jenn talk to my sister about marriage - Jenn was glad that she waited to get married because she changed a lot.

When we showed up at David's house, we heard a cat crying from behind a wall of hedges. We looked for it with our cell phone lights but couldn't see it but it kept crying. I told Jess to go to the other side but she wouldn't so I did and it turned out to be Scooter, and it crawled under the hedge into David's yard. Jess didn't even see it scurry away, it was lost in the night, although it came back inside later.

I headed to the kitchen area later and got some Gummi Bears, and then some more gummi bears, and then some more. I talked about the time Jenn accidentally ate the paper part of Fruit by the Foot, after asking Ryan and Jess what the name for that was anyway. We also talked a little bit about my going on Semester at Sea in 2010 and how I was going through "Pirate Alley." Some seemed scared and some thought it was okay, Dad said he only had $2 in the event of ransom and otherwise I was screwed. I said that they'd never been captured so it was okay, but secretly I hoped we were captured by 1600-style pirates, or maybe even 1700-style.

My mom went to print out boarding passes and I went and we talked about Semester at Sea and Barack Obama and his court cases about his citizenship and if David actually had to convince Wendy to vote for him. The printer ran out of paper and I printed my itinerary for SaS. My mom told David about draft mode on the printer, which I first heard about years ago on an NPR segment about sophisticated consumers.

Earlier, young David had made me give him a piggyback ride. I made space shuttle noises and so did he, and I was convinced I didn't want kids because I don't like playing things other than Facts in Fives and pianos.

Jenn and her family left so we said goodbye to all of them. My mom had given them their Christmas present earlier, but they already had the Pokemon DVD game, so we had to find out a way to return it and get them something else. I'm not sure how that was resolved.

Wendy was holding the baby now; Grandmom had it earlier when she was on the rocking chair with him. I showed Wendy where I was going for SaS and she mentioned some places she'd been and that I should get some leather in Alexandria (I think). She said that Hong Kong was like New York but with three times as many people, but I said it was okay because they were 1/3 the size, and she added "and all with jet black hair."

We went home after that and I read more creepy things 'cuz I'm a loser, wrote this, and am now going to sleep.

Peace out!

The Girl in Green

There was a girl at the Marriott Hotel the day we went there for lunch who was sitting alone at a table for a while (later with a younger brother) with black hair, a green bikini swimsuit, and interesting eyes, although I can't remember why. Maybe it was color, or maybe it was shape, but there was something uniquely intense about them. It wasn't particularly attractive or not, but it was striking and you couldn't help but notice if you looked at her. She was probably 18 or something like that.

She was behind me when I sat down at the table. The bar near the food area was playing music, including the song "Suddenly I See." I asked my sister about it; she didn't know who it was by but knew it was the same girl who sang "Black Horse in a Cherry Tree," which was a familiar name but not tune. While the song was playing, the girl in green walked up to the bar without me noticing, and on her way back she was lipping the words to the song. I just happened to be looking in her direction and made eye contact for a fraction of a second while she was lipping. She flashed a smile very very quickly, and then her face returned to normal and she stopped lipping, as if to say, "I mean, I don't actually like that song?" I didn't mean it, but I thing I looked angry at the time because it was sunny and I was squinting and I didn't mean to look at her so I didn't smile or stop looking possibly-angry, and I kind of felt like I ruined her fun for the moment.

Peace out.

Third Day in Florida

On the second day my Grandmom had a delusion that we were supposed to eat breakfast at her house, and we saw that she bought materials when we went to use her bathroom so we agreed to eat there the next day.

I woke up next to my sister and apparently my mom woke me and was wearing my green Brasil jacket (which contained my Aviators) and I just said, "MY JACKET" and apparently dreamed she had been wearing it the previous night. Then I guess I woke up and got ready to go, and we walked over at about 9:30. My grandmom said we were very punctual.

We were afraid she would make the batter too thick so I handled the batter with a little help from Jess, and Jess tried to cook at first but they kept getting burnt so I took over. They turned out all fine but I thought some of them were mushy in the middle and they were "wheat honey" pancakes rather than just plain pancakes, so that wasn't great. My parents came at the end of breakfast after we had helped clean up a little bit and talked to my grandmom about moving and her whole ordeal and basically ordered her to keep it colder in her apartment. It was weird. We were about to go shopping and Jenn and her family were going to come for a spaghetti lunch; Grandmom kept trying to leave with us but after a while we got it through that she had to stay to have lunch with the rest of them.

The walk to and from Grandmom's was very wet because it rained the night before. I walked barefoot through the grass and my dad said it could have lizards and snakes and he was serious.

We went to the stores a tiny bit later and my mom saw a jewelry store where she could get her watch battery replaced. It was decorated from Christmas and it had very gawdy jewelry that Mrs. Rock would have loved. The couple running the store was from Brooklyn and an old customer walked into their store down here and was surprised. They moved because of the weather (the owners, that is). We asked how long a drive it was to Kennedy Space Center - about 90 minutes, they agreed.

We kept walking by the shops. My dad asked what 3 Rednecks was because it was headlining one of the places; my sister and I figured it was a band or a show. It was very hot and I kept feeling tired and just a little bit sick to my stomach, and I was just not in a very great mood. We went into some stores looking for gifts or sunglasses and were mostly disappointed. One store we stayed in for a while was April Daze; I look at "Porn for Women" which had muscley men doing things like cleaning a cat litterbox with talk bubbles saying things like, 'Nothing better than cleaning up after the cutest things on four legs.' The shop owner said, "THAT'S SO FUNNY YOU'RE READING THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE AFRAID!!!" which drew the attention of my dad to the fact that I was reading Porn for WOMEN, which was a little bit awkward. I think my sister got some journals for her students there.

There was one shop with two very small dogs in it of the owners' and they were very cute, but we left quickly.

There was one shop with a peace-sign shirt that I liked but it was for girls. They also had things that let water fall down glass that you put up against a wall that I like so much, but they were prohibitively expensive, ruining my plans to line my entire house with them.

After that we looked for a place to get lunch. Burger King's broiler was broken, so we went to McDonald's, and I got chicken. I took a long time to eat because I took the fried part off, and I ended up not even being done eating when everyone else was, so I had to rush and eat a little bit of the fried part, too.

We were supposed to go to Sea World that day but it was a long drive and expensive and no one really cared enough to go, so we went to a local Florida Oceanographic Institute instead with Jenn and her family. We got in free. My sister spilled some soda on the car floor. We looked at sting rays and then went on a nature trail walk and I talked to Jenn about the movie Milk and things at Brown and politics and how people called her husband Dead an "Obamacan" and that she was proud to have converted him, which I thought was sort of funny. We walked back to the stingray pool to watch a program on them and then you had an opportunity to feed them because they had been de-barbed, but it was too slow for me so I lost attention and wandered to other things. There was a hermit-crab-finding-its-shell game, a starfish pool, and a help the turtle find its way to the sea game. We checked the gift shop and then I checked out the indoor part and then we left for the Shell Beach.

(We saw bathtub beach the day earlier; it was guarded by a shallow reef and had very calm water)

Shell Beach was largely eroded and had huge coral/rocks sticking out everywhere which was very painful. Richard danced on them which was dangerous and he didn't seem to understand why. We drove down to a nice beach while Jenn/Jess/Mom/youngkids walked to the nice beach, about a half-mile down. We hung out there for a little while and then went back to our hotel and showered and watched TV before going to dinner at a place called Dolphin Bar.

The wait was very long. First we went to the gift shop but there was nothing I liked, so I went back and saw my dad at the desk buying a giftcard for the Brandt's (since we're staying in their apt). He told me there was a lot of history and to check out the pictures, so I did, they were of people I didn't know, including some girl named Florence whose last name I forget (it started with an L) and letters from Ronald Reagan and an old couple sitting beneath a picture of Richard Nixon and lots of other people I didn't know. My mom made my dad buy her a really gawdy silver/stone beachy bracelet for her big Christmas gift since she's impossible to shop for and he hadn't gotten her anything big. She liked it, and liked that she got it cheaper than his website said it was worth (she checked at home). There was a book on the table of letters from kids in a JD Parker 4th Grade class to someone who got them a class subscription to Cousteau's Kids, which apparently had stuff about albino dolphins, beluga whales, and pollution in its September and October issue. The kids wrote well but used the word "elated" to describe their reaction to the magazine with surprising frequency.

I texted when I got bored. My sister was about to make us play the Name Game when our table was called (the one about people's initials) and my dad was getting really impatient. My mom didn't like the table so we got another one that she liked about 5 minutes later. I got chicken and chocolate cake, and we fed bread to a bunch of catfish that were hanging around the dock at the back of the restaurant. When I got back, I mostly read SomethingAwful's topic on creepy reads from Wikipedia, then came here.

Peace out.

The Second Day in Florida

Hint! Don't read this if you want me to have stories to tell you when I get back :-P

I slept on the couch the first night here. It has a hard-wood frame, but there are cushions on all three dimensions so I thought I might be able to sleep on it. My parents got one bed, my brother the only other, and my sister took the aerobed because I had been tired earlier and thought I'd be able to sleep on the couch. I remember watching some SNL before going to bed, including the episode where Ben Affleck hosted and played Keith Olbermann and apparently Obama actually made a guest appearance, but I was hoping to fall asleep long before he would actually be in the show, so I changed the channel to something else, though I forget what.

It turned out falling asleep was a lot harder than I thought. I had two blankets and an extra pillow, but I could not figure out what combination of them was right, and I didn't have my own baby blanket. I tossed and turned most of the night and didn't get a very good sleep.

We were supposed to get up and go see relatives and possibly fish at the beach at something like 8AM or maybe a little later, but I think somehow my parents could tell that none of us were very well rested. They woke me up when they got up because the couch is right near the kitchen and etc., and I said, "Do we have to go now?" And they said that the kids could sleep a while longer but they were going to go out until about 10:30, so I wrapped myself up (wearing only my underwear) in one of the blankets I had, trudged to my mom and dad's INCREDIBLY SOFT BED, and disappeared in the marshmallow-like mattress for the next few hours. Apparently my sister tried to find me in it and could hardly see me poking up between the folds in the mattress and pillows. I remember before going there, though, my mom said something about getting doughnuts, which I was pleased to find when I woke up for real. I had one (Dunkin Donuts), chocolate with sprinkles. My sister pointed out that the box spelled it "HOLIDDAYS" but we concluded it was to match with "DD" for Dunkin Donuts.

We got our sunscreen on and our swimsuits and went to the beach. It was warm outside, but it was windy and the water was a bit cold - probably high sixties - and wind+coldish water is never a very fun combination, so I didn't go in. My dad and his brother fished a lot, and David caught a few whiting fish. He was using shrimp as bait, which he said wasn't a great choice from an economic standpoint, but you got very fresh fish. They also used sand fleas as bait, which were little crab things they caught by skimming the sand in the shallows. David was going to keep the extras by boiling them for 45 seconds and them freezing them. Jessica tried to cast the rod a few times but was not very good at getting it far out.

Richard and David played in the water a lot, but not so much the older kids. It was a very nice day outside, incredibly blue everywhere. My dad chatted up a passing family with the bucket of sand fleas we had collected, it reminded me of how personable he can be if he feels like it. I took a picture of him chatting them up. We buried the youngest David (my cousin, not uncle) in the sand up to his head and he dug himself out and then rinsed himself off with my sister's help. My uncle David showed us how to fit a 13' fishing rod in your truck.... pop the trunk window open and close it lightly on top of the rod and hope it doesn't break.

After that, my parents took us on a tour of the island, I think it's called Hutchinson Island. It wasn't incredibly impressive, but it was nice, I guess. There's all different types of water everywhere - rivers, oceans, bays, inlets, whatever. We were looking for a beach called Avalon but we never found it, and just turned around to go back and maybe find something to eat. We ended up eating at the Marriott which, in this town, is just a RIDICULOUS resort with way too much space and its own golf course and beach and etc. When we showed up it was really busy, and one woman was reserving a number of tables for her party of 15, and my mom yelled at me to grab one table the second the party of four that had been occupying it left it. Even after we sat down, it took about 15 minutes to get a waiter, and ended up taking at least an hour to get our food after that. We came in at about 1:15 and didn't get out until 2:30, which was when we were supposed to meet our family at the pool back at our complex.

So we drove back there after food and showered off the salt and sand, but then we all needed to go to the bathroom, so my siblings and I went to our grandma's apartment to use the bathroom (she lives in the same complex) and then convinced her to walk to the pool with us. Then the kids all went swimming with Richard and young David. We played tag. My mom's camera had a lens error sometime during our swimming after my dad touched it, and my mom asked me to fix it but I couldn't, so I became her official photographer. We tried to throw Richard but it didn't work very well; Ryan could do it best alone. David didn't want to be thrown. We did handstands in the pool. After a while I got a headache and wanted to go back, but my mom made me wait until my dad could drive me even though we lived ten seconds away, so I had to wait for all the kids.

I took a nice long shower when I got back because it helps when I have this type of headache (sun and temperature changes and swimming/chlorine) and my mom and sister yelled at me for using hot water when we had a small tank, which I didn't know. We basically sat around until it was time to go to my uncle David's house for dinner. I can't remember what we did in between, I'm sure we just watched something on TV.

Apparently we stopped at a beach and I took some pictures when we drove to the tip of the island. I also remember unloading my pictures after my shower to clear up my memory card, since I think it's only 256MB.

The sky was really pretty when we drove to David's. We took my grandmom's car because we took her, so that was six people, which is too much for one car. When we showed up my mom made me show Wendy how to do things on her new camera, not against my will, but probably against Wendy's. My mom basically was like "HERE LET JEFF SHOW YOU COOL THINGS." It took a while but I figured out how to do color accent on her camera. I remember House was on TV. When I showed up, the first thing I did was pet their very very very very very fluffy and dark black cat named Scooter under their table for a while, and then Wendy gave me a cat comb to make it better. He rolled on his stomach; it was very cute.

We had dinner of Pompano fish, which my uncle David had said were great for eating earlier in the day and said he was really excited to cook for us. It was pretty good, and we all sat together at the same time, except for baby Lucien, who was sleeping, but cried at the very end of dinner. My sister took care of him, but then after a while Wendy's mom (Cathy?) took care of him instead. The conversation seemed to split in two then between men and women, but as usual, I favored the women. I think my dad and David were talking about fish, which I couldn't take. The women were talking about motherhood which was sort of interesting. Cathy also talked about the years people were born (Wendy, David and I are all year of dragon), and we talked some about music and math and a kid they knew named Leon who was an actuary and wealthy in Hong Kong. At some lull in the conversation we all went to the other room but I forget why.

Oh, we watched the Eagles game earlier and they destroyed the Cowboys. Also, I remember looking for the bread from dinner after dinner was over, and getting a cup of cold water dispensed from INSIDE the refridgerator, which was very strange. I also found out Wendy had a facebook and said I would friend her, which I did today.

When we went back home, I drove because I didn't drink anything, and after that I think we pretty much just watched Family Guy and House and went to bed. I slept with my sister this time.

Oh, my Aunt Jenn stayed in her hotel that day because she was very tired - her kids have tons of energy. Also, I was without sunglasses because I left them in my coat pocket, and I left my coat at David's house.

Peace out.