What I did on my vacation

Not a lot, actually. We spent a week at Sandbridge, Virginia, just south of Virginia Beach. There are no highrises, waterparks and boardwalks at Sandbridge, but there are a lot of people in the surf by day, packed into beach houses and condos on narrow lots by night.

Fortunately, the beach borders the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, so if you really want to get away from it all, you can just ignore the Access Prohibited sign on the beach, and before you know it, you're surrounded by sea gulls and sandpipers. Although there's nothing you can do about the Navy fighter jets roaring overhead.

Which is where I found this honking huge clam shell, still intact. I'm pretty proud of it. I am no kind of hunter, not even a shell hunter. And there it was, being played with by a seagull. I exercised my God-given dominion over nature in a rather high-handed way; I clean took it from him. I looked up the shell in my mother-in-law's guide book, and come to find out it's a Quahog, an Algonquin name. Lives in the sand from the low tide line to 50 feet of water.

I also found a beautiful Shark's Eye (not pictured). And as it turns out, the shark's eye preys on bivalves like the Quahog by boring a hole through its shell, and eating the meat therein. My Quahog has one little, tiny, perfectly round indention, but no other evidence of penetration.

My brother-in-law and I took Ethan fishing, caught a few spots that made for a nice accent piece on the dinner plate, and Ethan caught a stingray. Proudest moment of his life--sting rays being one of his peculiar obsessions. We threw it back, and I was proud that Ethan didn't mind. 

The water was a tad cooler than I'm used to, vacationing in North Carolina, but the waves were crashing the first few days we were there, and full of sand and brine, so it was invigorating. Unfortunately, I seem to be allergic to salt water. Every trip to the beach, but only when I swim, the skin on my chest and shoulders turns red, feels like it's shrunk two sizes too tight, and tingles, like I've become a pin cushion. I saw an allergist about it once. He said he had no idea what I was talking about, and hustled me out of the office with a handful of Claritin samples. I think he thought I was lying. 

Mainly what I did on my vacation was not troll the internet. The house we stayed in had no connection. At the end of the week, my mother-in-law figured out that she could get on through the neighbor's router if she stood on the deck. I checked my email, read about some loose ends I have to tie up from that summer school class I taught, and breathed a sigh of relief.

If hating that thing you have to have is an addiction, then I've developed something of an addiction to the internet. Mainly blogs (political, religious and sports-oriented) and Facebook. This is how it happened. I don't have a TV show I'm following; I don't like to watch movies because I get up so early, and all the reading I do at the library extinguished my enthusiasm for pleasure reading at home. So the internet filled my evenings. But I'm sick of it. It's no way to spend a couple of hours, checking and checking again to see if a site has been updated, like some glassy-eyed old lady feeding a slot machine with quarters, hoping this time something will turn up.

I need a new relationship with the internet. And I'm bound and determined to do it. I had a great meeting with my adviser and the Dean before we left on vacation, and if I work hard, I think I can take my comprehensive exams in January rather than May. I need to get out of grad school ASAP. Money don't grow on trees. And I can't get out ahead of time checking Facebook every 15 minutes.

So, no internet by day, unless I'm searching the library's catalog or one of the library's many online databases. I will blog and/or look at web sites after 5:00 PM, and for not too long. And I will fill my time with other stuff. I picked up the Aubrey Maturin series again, mainly out of desperation, and was delighted to discover that it charmed me as much the second time around. Just because my work is reading all day doesn't mean I can't do it for fun by night.

Comments

[Laura Pate Rodier]

Check your quahog to see if there is a pearl inside. The quahog pearl is cazy rare and worth lots of $$$$$ if you can find a good one.