Beachy keen

California scored another point today for its convenient beach access. R and I boogied it up this afternoon at a beach that was more scenic, less crowded, and much closer to home than any of the beaches in Delaware or Alabama ever were to us. (Alabama also has the hurricane season working against it these days, so we're not exactly missing living there, although I will say its low cost of real estate does sound appealing right now.) The beach was fun today. I hope the end of summer doesn't keep us from returning in the coming weeks/months. Around here I'm guessing we have a little longer to work with.

Tomorrow is the first day back at school, isn't it? I get shivers thinking about that for some reason, even if it has little effect on my life any more. I remember all of those Labor Day evenings spent in dreaded anticipation, reviewing my locker combination over and over, wondering about my new class schedule and if I'd be able to find the right rooms, worried my classmates wouldn't like me anymore. To be honest I still have dreams related to those fears. I get a sense of relief when September comes around and my job doesn't change. There are things about school that I miss, but the first day of a new year is not one of them.

By the way, I'm planning to do some EDITING this week. My inspiration has been lost, but this weekend has gone a long way toward finding it.

Cape Cantaloupe

We took our bikes down to the beach on Saturday. We parked the car at Cape Henlopen (or, as I call it, Cape Cantaloupe) and biked the trail into Rehoboth with a stop at the outlet mall along the way for some shopping and frozen yogurt. To complete our loop and to fulfill the promise of adventure, we found ourselves on a trail on the way back where bikes are prohibited by law, probably for our own good. We ended up pushing them through a bug-ridden marsh and then, further on, trudging up and down over some major sand dunes for much further than we expected. Upon our successful return to the cape we hit the beach where an immense crowd was slowly being condensed due to a rising tide. The waves were the biggest I have ever boogied. It's a rare case when I back down and have to swim under a wave rather than take it head on, but it happened quite a bit on Saturday. I was still pounded and thrashed repeatedly. After that we drove—the car this time—back to Rehoboth and ate some terrific seafood at Café Zeus. It was a fun, active day. Our training for New Zealand has officially begun.

Recent DVDs watched, with ratings:
Gattaca - 4.5/5
Zodiac - 3.5/5
The Last King of Scotland - 3.5/5
Little Children - 3.5/5
The Queen - 3/5
Shaun of the Dead - 3/5
Derailed – 2.5/5
Deja Vu - 2/5

Jellyfish city

We drove over to the New Jersey shore (as opposed to the Delaware beach) yesterday. The traffic was really bad and it took us three hours to get there, but some excellent Boogie boarding conditions made the trip worth it. One thing that was new to R and I was the multitude of jellyfish we encountered in the water. These translucent, hockey puck-sized creatures were teeming around us. We were worried about being stung at first, but then we saw kids throwing them at each other and collecting them in buckets. One little kid enlightened us by saying that only the red ones were poisonous, and we were only seeing white ones. We were still leery to spend too much time under water in fear of getting one in the face, but we did our best to ignore them otherwise. It's funny--they do actually have some weight to them. When you are kicking around in the water, you can feel when your legs hit them. Sometimes they'll be on the sandy bottom and your feet will squish into them when you step down. It freaked us out a bit, but we weren't about to pass up "shredding" the bodacious waves over some harmless invertebrates.

Boogie

...that's a weird word when you look at it by itself. The reason I'm using it is because we bought boogie boards on Saturday and spent the day at Rehoboth Beach in southern Delaware. The waves were big, and they broke really close to shore due to a steep drop-off not far out. This of course resulted in us getting pounded on and scraped along the floor. It was fun! Seriously. I'm anxious to try it again.

On Sunday I had to pick up a cargo van and drive it down to Bel Air, Maryland to meet up with the production crew and help them pack up and haul their equipment into Wilmington. They're spending the next six weeks in town for the shoot, which begins today. We have a meeting scheduled for later this morning, and then we're heading over to the courthouse for our first scene. It could be a late night. I'm already finding that this is very time-consuming work, especially with the amount of set-up involved in a production of this size and quality. Cottage Cheese this is not.