Unabashed

Yes, I’m back, but my brain is custard and I’m leaking sanity behind me everywhere I go. I can’t seem to gear back down to regular life. So I’m taking a few more days off work to see if my brain will re-engage. I’ve already slogged through the 1500+ articles in my feed reader, without reading even half of them (sorry BoingBoing and i09, but I had to delete your 300+ each unread). So: I’m out of touch, have no idea what’s going on, and am very unlikely to catch back up any time soon. I see that the Large Hadron Collider is due to ramp up this month, so there’s that to look forward to. Other than that, the air is so humid it feels like I’m swimming in heat outside, and the AC can barely keep it below 85 inside in the 100 degree afternoon.

The vacation was fun. Very active, of course, and not exactly relaxing at all (is anything ever relaxing when you’ve got a 1 and 3 year old to chase? In a house with stairs?) But everyone had a good time. All the guys decided to take a fishing trip one particularly turbulent day, and for six hours we were tossed like the passengers aboard the USS Minnow. But we caught fish, yes, we did. Some of us vomited (not me). Here’s a pic I snapped over the side of the boat (the Anticipation), follow to my flickr page for the pic of the day’s catch (I’m the tall guy): red snapper, bonita, mahi mahi and trigger fish. A decent day, considering the condition of the water.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: beach, destin, fishing, florida, road trip, trip, vacation, weekender

Damn I want to go to the beach, take a vacation. I want to sweat in that good way, sunburned just enough to feel it, to look a little red, so my skin feels stretched and tingles. I want to hear the waves lapping the shore, to read Monsoon by Wilbur Smith by Wilbur Smith again–ships and pirates and bounty. I want to experience the ease of life that comes with knowing I don’t have anything to do that day but drink beer, smoke a cigar, listen to the ocean and read my book. Yeah. Just me and my cooler full of iced Coronas and sliced limes. I need it.

The picture below is of Dead Man’s Beach, Peter Island, BVI, 2004, the day I married Suzy. I know it’s not a good picture, but I was about as happy as I’ve ever been at that moment. That’s her on the beach. The island in to the right is Dead Man’s Chest, where Blackbeard abandoned fifteen men with nothing between them but a bottle of rum. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the shanty “Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” for Treasure Island, but no one knows if he made it up or if that was a real story. The beach, Dead Man’s Beach, is supposedly named thus because the bones of those fifteen men washed up on it.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: beach, blackbear, bvi, Caribbean, peter island, treasure island, vacation