Recharge

Until I crossed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge early Saturday morning, I had not realized how much I really needed a break from the mundane of every day life. 

We took an overnight, two day trip down toward the Port Charlotte area.  My childhood best friend was visiting her snowbird parents from Northern New York, so what better thing to do than take them to our favorite, not very well known beach.  Two left turns and a quick right at the round-about, and we were at the beach!  My friends thought it was as amazing as I do!

We spent the afternoon walking up and down the beach, collecting sharks teeth and sea shells.  We chatted with old men who had spoons attached to old golf club shafts – it was much easier than having to bend over every three seconds when you saw a shark tooth.  We sprawled out on the warm sand, played in the surprisingly warm water, and we all had these funny smiles on our face that showed how wonderful the sea air was treating us that day. 

I took a few moments for myself and walked up the beach.  Even though my daily life has a relatively low stress level, I do forget to take time out to just get away from everything.  This was that weekend for me.  I walked along the beach, hearing the surf crash, I watched the seagulls chasing each other, I watched the end of a wedding, and I took in a deep breath of salty air.  I was at peace!

We came back to the beach early Sunday morning for a few hours.  It was quiet when we arrived.  We wandered along the same stretch of beach as we had the day before, but it was like seeing it for the first time.  The water was a perfect green, like a piece of glass that tumbled across the ocean for a hundred years.  The sun kissed our shoulders, leaving pink in its place. 

I was in the place that makes me happiest, along the sea, with the love of my life.  I was refreshed and my batteries were recharged.  I made myself a promise that I wouldn’t wait so long to get back to that place.

Boob Tube

Today marks the 8th day that I have been living without any type of cable or satellite television.  I don't even have one of those little converter boxes to get the local channels. 

Zip, Zero, Zilch

This decision has been a long time coming.  For what was paid out monthly to the "Company-That-Must-Not-Be-Named" I could afford to take one additional vacation each year.  There were only a small number of channels that were watched on a somewhat regular basis, and there were many evenings that the box wasn't even turned on. 

So the decision was made to quit it, and the promise was made to give it a go for a minimum of 6 months.  Which is really good for my willpower, because that will be right about the time football season starts back up, and I can say that I gave it good try.

What does one do when there is nothing to surf through on a Tuesday night?  Tons of stuff!  Work on my blog, train the terrier, play Scrabble or Boggle, read, study for the class I am taking, work on that quilt I owe my mother, learn to knit, or catch up on what's new on the inter webs. 

Have I missed it?  For the most part no, I do not.  I have a good subscription to Netflix and an instant queue that might be completed by the time the next milestone birthday rolls around, and I have a Kindle with more books on it than I can possibly read this year.  I think I miss television the most in the morning.  I'd watch the local news until it looped and loved to hear Mike and Mike bicker like two old women. 

The investment will probably be made into the little converter box - we do live in a prime area for hurricanes and it will be nice to see those bad boys working their way over - just in case.

It's only been a week, but I feel lighter and freer and more in tune with the things that are more important. 

Box of Rocks

I moved a few years ago from Arkansas to Florida, so I looked at that as a time to clean out the boxes that were gathering dust in my attic. I found items from my childhood, diaries from when I was a teenager, study manuals from Navy boot camp, but the most interesting thing I found were rocks. In the bottom of several boxes, there were rocks. There were funny looking rocks, rocks that I clearly suckered a parent into buying me from an overpriced museum gift shop, and rocks that I had not the slightest clue as to where they may have been picked up. There were a few seashells rolling around in the bottom of those boxes also.

I sat in my garage in the sweltering summer Arkansas heat and thought about rocks. I've always been the type of person that when walking along, keeps one eye on where I am going, but also one eye on the ground, because you just never know when you will see something that should be picked up. I guess I've had this fascination with the fossils of the earth since I was a kid. I had never really thought about it before, but then I did recall that trip to a castle in Wales. I was wandering around the grounds of this perfect Welsh castle and there was a pile of rocks. I remember looking left, looking right and plunking a piece of that castle in my purse. That rock sits today on my home office desk with a picture of the castle.

Now that I live in Florida I obsess not only over the rocks, but the seashells! I have glass containers of them all over the house, I think it's a requirement for living near the sea. I'm borderline selfish when it comes to shells also. My mother came to visit this past Thanksgiving and we took a stroll on the beach one day after lunch. I brought my trusty bucket and proceeded to barge ahead of the group to be the first person to get all the great shells. Only later did I realize that was kind of selfish, and I gave up a portion of my loot to my mom. I did keep all the sharks teeth and sea glass though.

Even though My Life with Seashells was born today, out of the land of Blogger, My Life with Seashells began a few decades ago. I've recently hit the first significant milestone in my life that has made me step back and think about what is most important to me, what matters most, and what I want the next few decades to look like.

As the sea shapes and smooths the rocks and the glass and the shells, I will shape this next and new exciting chapter in my life.