Here N There

My month started with a trek across the country. Since then life has been less dramatic but certainly busy. After three weeks of living less than 2 miles from the beach, I finally got there! It's more complicated than you might think, especially when there is lots of traffic. A&C took L and I there for a very relaxing afternoon in the sand and sun. The water was pretty cold but we splashed around some anyway, then retreated to the sand to toss a frisbee around. Then we wandered up and down the shore looking for strange creatures and cool shells. Here are some pictures.

Side note: I am trying to figure out what screen color mode to use for photo editing. These first ones were "fixed" in a normal LCD mode. Normally I edit photos with my screen on a photo setting (as is the case with the last two). So tell me which ones look better on your screen and which ones look either washed out or too dark. Okay, enough about all that. I present to you, the beach!

 Though you can't see any in this picture, there were a lot of large ships just off shore. It was kind of a weird experience. It was like Duluth times 50. We had binoculars along and I spent some time just studying them. This little lagoon and the nearby rocks housed some interesting critters.

 Here is one of the strange little things that we found. Isn't it a sea anemone? Or however you spell that? I don't know. It looked cool, though!

 And here is another... thing. Creature? Mold? It looks like retro spaghetti. There was this other stuff too that was mixed in with the seaweed. It was green and transparent and had the consistency of rubber. It was in long stringy tubers, so I think it was a plant. We threw it at each other.

Then there was this spikey little dude. He was kind of dehydrated.

I don't know what kind of creature lived here, but this shell could tell an interesting tale. There were a lot of pretty shells on the beach but there were also some really ugly ones like this that had massive gouges and pits and chips. It makes me wonder what kind of life the creature lived, what kinds of perils he survived through. I'm guessing he didn't just sit on the floor of the ocean all day, looking pretty. To get scars like that he must have been riding the waves and crashing against the rocks. And I bet he was loving it!

Yay, I finally got to sit under a palm tree! It feels so exotic! Oh, and I have since learned that banana trees (which this isn't) aren't trees at all. They are plants. They spring up each year from a shoot, grow to full height, produce bananas, and then die and fall over. Crazy! They are so tall, and God makes them do that every year. And I thought that plants didn't grow well in sand...

My assorted friends who went to the beach.

*okay, now the pictures change to photo mode*

I didn't go swimming with him, but he did kind of hang around while we were under the palm tree. I'm sure he was hoping to join us for snacks, but we didn't invite him.

Okay, enough with the fun stuff. Last weekend was serious. Really. It was the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It's such a sober event, some of the teams dress up like Star Wars characters and pixies. Fortunately for you, I didn't get any good pictures of them. Darth Vader in a speedo is not something you can see without lifelong scars. A lot of my coworkers had kids in the tournament (or where playing themselves) so I spent the afternoon watching and cheering them on.

The other major event that has marked the month is the arrival of my roommate. He got here about a week ago and I had to re-adjust to living in my apartment. It is tough combining two different schedules and sharing everything. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, the one frying pan and the two precious electrical outlets... If we want to plug in a fan, we have to unplug a computer. My desk doubles as the kitchen table, which does horrors for my already-weak organizational skills. We also had only one key for a while, with the result that I frequently got locked out. But it's better now. We got a second key, we've decided that sleep is overrated, we may be getting a power strip soon to deal with that dilemma, and we are getting along well. We both need to get better at spending time with God, though, so please pray that we each figure out when, how, and where to do that.

He is German and once in a while I make him speak German so I can try to remember some of what Frau Gibson tried to teach me ten years ago. I don't usually catch much. So we carry on many good conversations in English. We sing together too. There was an old guitar in the conference room that was missing a string, so I got new strings and re-strung it Thursday night. Now we both play it, tune it, play it, tune it... I have decided that living alone is easier but not necessarily better. It has been helpful for me also to suddenly be the experienced guy rather than the new guy. Whether I actually know what I'm doing or not, my room mate assumes that I do!