jducoeur

msmemory and I have been on vacation in Florida for the past week. Those entries were locked, on the grounds of "Don't tell the world that there's nobody home". They're now public; if you care to read them, they can be found under the "sanibel 07" tag.

Overall, a pleasant and mellow time. I let myself settle into island time for the week, so we didn't actually *do* much, but enjoyed not doing so. A week was just enough to leave my itching to get productive again, which I'm going to leverage: coding on CommYou should start on Wednesday, I've decided. Now I just need to kick this cold that I picked up from my stepsister...

Above me, it is Blue. Neither the indigo of the east, nor the cyan of the west, but the perfect midpoint, platonically Blue.

Moving west, the Blue begins to lighten and fade. Mare's-tail wisps of cloud add themselves, looking like bits of lace dangled carelessly in the sky, but never so thick as to look genuinely messy -- rather, they are artistically draped across, to add a bit of Victorian elegance to a sky that would otherwise be too modernist.

Further on, the blue washes out, almost white for a bit as the red tones add themselves. The sky thickens, turning into a solid wall -- the sort of hard painted sphere that could have convinced the ancients that the globes were drawn upon it. The lower wall is a bright orange, vivid enough that it might be garish in any other setting. Down at the baseboard, it is painted the richest violet. And placed right along the bottom of the wall sits the red semi-circle of the sun, bright enough to draw the eye but no longer so much so as to blind it.

Below the horizon line, the waves are gentle, rising and falling like a sea of huge tortoises in constant motion. Their fronts are deep ocean blue, dark as the mysteries they hide; their backs are coppery bright, so the overall effect is of an reddish-orange sea, broken here and there by more ordinary tones.

At my feet, the tide is pulling out -- each wave hesitates and thinks about it before breaking onto me. They are washing away the sand beneath my shoes, but I stand there, sinking into the beach one grain at a time. I too am part of the painting, and I am in no rush to spoil it...

While we were out and about on Monday, we began to notice that, as at home, Sanibel is prone to lots of inflated statues of Santa and friends. But y'know -- it's just different in this setting. Whether you're talking about Santa being pulled by dolphins, or a parrot perched next to a stocking, the juxtapositions are truly curious to my cold-and-snow-minded brain.

Since it was already Christmas Eve, and we didn't know how long everything would be up, I grabbed msmemory's camera and did a high-speed ride down Periwinkle Way (the main drag of Sanibel), taking snaps of the fun. So click on Frosty the Mighty to see The Silly Santas of Sanibel...

Family Priorities: The open question about the new condo is whether to sacrifice some of the kitchen space in order to build a den. Dad thinks that this could increase the appeal of the unit to larger families, but some of us have been skeptical.

Tonight, we found ourselves with seven adults in the kitchen simultaneously, all cooking. We have tentatively agreed that making the kitchen smaller is probably *not* a good idea...

Starting the Sitcom: Having the family together always produces moments of comedy. Today's -- well, one of Dad's guests, some time ago, had claimed that he'd managed to lock himself out on the lanai. We had always wondered how someone could do that -- and then came today. We had just finished moving all our stuff from E2 to D47, and Dad, msmemory and I had wandered out onto the porch to enjoy the afternoon. Sandy came out to join us, and closed the door behind her. Which was fine, until I tried to get back in.

So here we are, on a fourth-floor screen porch, locked out. All the members of the family who have keys to the unit are here. We realize that, in the future, we need to be prompter about investigating strange guest problems.

Fortunately, the lady from the cleaning service is still down in E2, and we have her cell number, so we call her up to rescue us. Dad and I spend the next fifteen minutes playing with the door, figuring out *how* you can lock yourself out. It's not easy to do, but we eventually reproduce the problem. Something to fix soon.

Biking through twilight: One of the delights of the island is biking around. The whole thing is flat, and covered in bike paths, so we never bother to get a car. msmemory and I decide that we want a few staples in C36 (the unit we wound up in), so we bike on over to Bailey's, the local general store. It's about a mile down Tarpon Bay Road, right through the middle of the nature preserve. Lovely and bucolic -- no noise except for the occasional passing car, thick brush all around us, and the sky slowly turning pink above us. You just can't hold onto stress in such a place.

Vacation time, and so it's time for another impressionistic set of posts recording That Which Catches My Attention. As usual, these will be locked until we get back.

The Southwest Scramble: That really sounds like it should be some sort of breakfast preparation involving chipotle, but it actually refers to the mad dash onto the fully-booked airplane. (For those who haven't flown Southwest: it's lovely, but you don't get assigned seats. Instead, you get assigned a numbered boarding pass when you check it, up to 24 hours in advance. You line up in order, and then grab seats as you get onto the plane, so strategy is important.) Neither msmemory or I are terribly fond of rubbing shoulders with a potentially 300-lb stranger for five hours, so we make a beeline for the two-seat exit row. It doesn't recline, and it doesn't have as much leg room as the exit row behind it, but the elbow room is lovely.

First Night in the New Place: Just for tonight, we stay with Dad and Sandy in E2, our new condo. A few years back, Dad bought a rental property here on Sanibel, and it's been his toy ever since, gradually turning it into quite the luxury joint -- lovely decor, fine appliances, and all the toys a geek is likely to want. So a month or so ago, he took some of my sister's and my trust fund, and invested it in another unit.

It isn't as fancy as Dad's original condo at this point, and it'll always be slightly smaller, but it's ground floor -- practically right next to the pool, and feet from the beach -- so it looks like it's going to be a popular rental. And of course, now it is Dad and Sandy's new toy. They're already having fun with a little redecoration, and the family will be talking this week about what we're going to do with the big renovation next year.

Anyway, it's already pretty nice, but a bit odd for msmemory and me -- we get the kids' room for the night, so we're in separate twin beds. First time we've done that in a bunch of years...