With more tacos, beer, good dogs, and some retail therapy. No beach today, it’s 94 and feels like 116 and there is thunder in the distance, so porch time it is for the afternoon.
More pato tacos from Coastal Cantina
A Very Good AussieDoodle Puppy
A butterfly I saw between lunch and shopping
You can’t have too many Life Is Good shirts
Just one thing, but it is part of what is bothering me a bit about this trip.
I’m not writing.
Usually, the change of scenery and ocean air results in hours of writing while I’m down here. Sure, it’s stuff that never sees the light of day, but stories just come tumbling out of my head.
This year – nothing. Not even the glimmer of an idea.
Weird.
And disappointing.
Because you’d think this view would definitely do something:
You don’t get much more serene than this
And while I’m fairly relaxed and enjoying doing quite a lot of nothing, I still can’t really disconnect – keep thinking about the work waiting for me when I get back, and there is going to be a lot of it on all fronts, personal and professional.
I know I should just LET IT THE FUCK GO, as I am insanely lucky to have a job that gives me enough PTO to take over a week off at a time and pays enough to actually get out of town for that time. (I am partially blaming the last minute change in venue, I’m still a bit off kilter over it.). But my stress levels are still far too high for being at the beach with ready access to good food, the ocean, iced coffees, and covered porches.
One of my coworkers says you really need two weeks solid off from this job – she’s probably right. Maybe next year I’ll take the whole week off before the trip rather than just two days. We’ll see. (Maybe I’ll win the lottery and it will be a non-issue, LOL.).
The challenge is in getting everything OFF your plate before leaving – this year I had an odd confluence of events that resulted in my taking time off the last week of June, which was great, but the week leading up to it was BRUTAL and I simply could not get everything done and ended up taking work with me. I’ve got my work laptop here again, ugh.
I’m mainly just logging in to delete emails so Outlook doesn’t crash on Monday morning. (I get on average 50 a day. Between midday Thursday and close of business Friday, I had 94, of which I kept ONE. It’s ridiculous.) But I’m also perpetually on the lookout for something getting escalated or a client reopening a closed ticket and then getting mad because I’m not responding, or ending up on the “case hasn’t been updated in X days” list despite the fact I’ve told the client I’ll be out and will pick back up when I return and they’re fine with it.
(The “reopen a closed ticket” bit did happen on Thursday morning – it was sheer luck that I was online and happened to see it and got it reassigned.)
Next year I will do a better job of abandoning all work related nonsense before vacation. (It wasn’t this bad the past two years and I can’t put my finger on what has changed, other than I think our staffing levels are woefully inadequate, but management thinks otherwise.)
Now I need to stop and think about the important things. Like, what is for lunch.
Hey, here are some sunbathing turtles who live at the coffee shop!
Sunbathing turtles at Duck’s Cottage
Twitter is being shit and won’t let me post this lovely crab gif from earlier today.
To be honest, not sure if the crab is blowing a kiss there at the end or flipping me off
7/16 2:11PM, edited to correct issue with caption.
It would certainly seem that I can’t.
While I find that while I am quite relaxed here on vacation, I can’t really “unplug” so to speak.
I can’t help but think part of it is this 100MPH 24/7 news cycle where we’re constantly on guard for what awful thing the Fuckface in Chief and his administration will be doing next. It’s exhausting not just trying to keep up with it all (that in an of itself is a full time job) – but in the realization that the average person is so fucking powerless right now to change it. (Hey, Dems in Congress, do something so we can turn off the news and get some sleep at night, OK?)
It was obviously easier in the pre-smartphone/WiFi in every cottage days to just let things go and realize you’d find out what you missed when you got back to the real world of work and laundry and such. There have been vacations where I had no idea what was going on in the world, and I was fine with that.
Now, not so much, at least for me.
To those who can turn off their phone and decide Twitter simply does not exist for a week? I salute you. Your mental health is likely far better than mine, LOL.
On that note, I’m going to sit on the porch and read for a bit and try to pretend the rest of the world isn’t on fire. I’m on book two of Drew Hayes NPC series, and it’s quite entertaining – I highly recommend it.
And it was lovely as always. Didn’t hurt that the water was not freezing and the DUKN7 buoy says we’re looking at 78 degree water again today.
Gif of beach waves
Made some new friends at the coffee shop:
A duck at Duck’s Cottage
Duck, Duck, GOOSE!
The turtles on this end of the pond are a little more timid than where we usually stay – they wait until I’m back on the porch to come eat the food. If you look closely, you can see one just to the left of the tree in the center.
I swear, nothing makes it more apparent that I’ve turned into my parents than the annual trip to the beach.
While I love the ocean, actually sitting on the beach is pretty much last for all I am excited about. It’s all the fantastic food, followed by a ton of peace and quiet, the wildlife – AND HOLY SHIT A DEER JUST LITERALLY RAN THROUGH THE YARD AND THEN JUMPED IN THE CREEK AND TOOK A SWIM AND JUMPED OUT AND WENT ON ITS MERRY WAY!!! (No lie, it happened as I was sitting on the porch typing this.)
And then, sitting on the beach.
Also, in true channeling my parents fashion – I wake up long before my alarm. (I suspect this has more to do with crashing early after eating way too much than suddenly becoming a morning person, but here we are.)
Though we got off to a slightly rough start this year – two hours out from the beach and the rental agency calls and tells me the previous tenants flooded the house we were supposed to stay at – they got us another place, while it’s not what I would have picked, it works well enough.
I like not being in a rush. I like not being stressed. I like being able to just quietly exist. Things that just do not happen at home.
What I think is an Eastern Willet
Some liquid sunshine:
Just a pretty flower
Crab claws from Coastal Provisions – fried in butter, wine, garlic, Texas Pete, & Old Bay. Amazing!
Night Sounds:
Shrimp & grits from Coastal Provisions
Chocolate mousse cake from Coastal Provisions
View from the porch
Talkative crows:
Pato tacos from the Coastal Cantina
Morning rituals
7/16 11:26 AM – Edited to fix some caption issues.
Tip Jar
Not really appropriate for a 4th of July event here in the US. Yes, other places do that, but they’re other places. And moving 2.5 million from the Park Service for this bullshit. Not like they’re constantly overflowing with funds.
On the whole, the event is going to be a shitshow between the tanks (yes, I know they’re not all really tanks) the fireworks being moved AND used as a bribe on tariffs, and this fucking VIP section for 45’s speech – which will no doubt quickly turn into a campaign speech, which raises a whole other set of issues.
All this while we’re torturing people on the border.
And 45 has decided that he’s going to try to override the Supreme Court to get his racist citizenship question on the census. (Don’t tell me he doesn’t want to try to share that info with ICE.)
The only saving grace is that the weather is not looking good tomorrow and I hope it rains fucking buckets and ruins his day.
But I am genuinely enjoying watching the GOP lose the collective shit over this freshman Congress.
You can tell they’re lashing out in fear. And they should be afraid. They’ve gotten away with enabling 45 an his hateful policies for two years too long.
Hopefully we can get this shutdown over and done with here soon – despite 45’s insistence that he wants it to go on for months or years until he gets his way…
The D’s need to remind the GOP that Congress is a co-equal branch and are supposed to be one of the checks against the Executive branch and they need to do their damn job. It’s government 101.
We can’t go on with a raving lunatic wannabe dictator in the Oval Office who is essentially locking people out of their jobs and livelihoods because of his dumbass wall, destroying the economy his harebrained policies, and making us look like idiots on the world stage.
Representative Talib is right – it’s past time to impeach the the motherfucker.
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Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female. 