Sort This!

While in a long meeting this afternoon, I mused over an item I recently saw perusing Skymall Magazine during a recent flight, amid the countless yard ornaments and luxury items for your pets:

A plastic cup that you presumably allow your adorable offspring to use to separate the cereal from the marshmallow goodness in Lucky Charms?

These is so much wrong with this; that we need another useless plastic implement (it's a long list, but I include in it those plastic devices with different sized holes that help you measure the correct amount of spaghetti like you can actually screw up and cook too much, and these charming plastic containers I saw at the store shaped and colored like either lemons, onions or tomatoes to store either lemons, onions or tomatoes in that probably don't "keep" them any better, if even as well, as the plastic bag you brought them home in) on the planet whose oceans and landscape are choking in it. Is there truly a need for these?

Back to the cereal, if you want your child to eat marshmallows for breakfast, buy 'em a bag of Jet-Puffed or even better - a jar of marshmallow creme. Instead of letting them sit and sift out the toasted oat cereal (Lucky Charms via Wikipedia - If Wikipedia can be trusted, this cereal is the original Cheerios with sugar and marshmallows added, and I never realized there were so many iterations of the marshmallow shapes), probably leaving them for you to eat, buy some Cheerios for yourself in the first place. Do parents actually let their children sort the cereal?? I remember getting seriously chewed out for trying to dig the prizes from the bottom of the box before we ate all the cereal, but then, we didn't have a handy tool to dig it out with.

Leaving Ocean Shores

We tourists probably think this is adorable-I  know I do, I turned around to take this photo, but if it was my yard-probably not.

We had a mom and child deer visit us at the condo about dinner time Saturday night. We tossed out sliced veggies and apples. The little one just sniffed at them, but mom deer chowed down. We're probably not supposed to feed the deer, but it was obvious from their expectant looks up at us that, if not us, someone will...

Long Weekend at the Beach

We took a walk on the beach today. Normally the first thing I do when I get to the beach is shed my footwear and wade in the surf, but this trip, the water is a dark chocolate color and leaves a mucky residue on the beach. I have no idea what's caused it, but it's nothing I want my feet in, although we did see some people surfing this morning. Blech.

This was the sunset Friday night:

This morning I was looking at the tracks of someone who walked the beach in wedge heels, apparently. I find just walking in the sand my Keens fairly challenging and sure wouldn't try it in a heel. If it's all I had to walk in (and that would never happen - I subscribe to a one pair per day + another pair just in case strategy), probably I'd just take them off and brave the chocolaty muck.

My love of the ocean grew from horrible yearly family trips to the ocean when I was a kid. We'd start out in darkness, my parents would overdose me with dramamine because my Dad refused to stop the car if I got carsick and was outraged if I rolled down the window and puked down the side of the car. People who can't tolerate the unexpected probably shouldn't have children, but this is not a rant about my Dad.

Once at the ocean, we'd get up pre-dawn every day to go dig razor clams. I hated it, a squeamish young kid shouldn't have to kill things; once we got our limit, Dad would hasten off to a bar and the rest of us were free to nap, read, or explore. I spent a lot of time propped up against some driftwood with a book in my lap, watching the breakers and listening to the surf. I love it to this day, and nobody makes me go dig clams these days.