The Boy Who Walks into Walls

or, Johnny Potter and the Order of Idiocy

Yesterday older son got the see the inside of the ER. Things were relatively quiet there so he only had to wait 6 hours to be taken care of.
The story goes he was goofing off in the hall at school and he ran into a display case. Apparently no blood was lost but he has a non-lightning-shaped scar on the middle of his forehead. Nowadays wounds are closed with glue. Neat!




Last night was Dad's turn to sit in emergency rooms. Mom was working late so she managed to break from work to run to the emergency room. There she sat and teased older son for a bit until she had to run home to pick up the car to pick up younger son. She dropped him off at home and went back to work where she proceeded to save the world, leap tall buildings in a single bound and otherwise cure cancer and mental illness. And she didn't utter even one unforgivable curse.

I blurred his face in the photo to preserve his privacy. Silly I know but I did it anyway.

Mother son teams

It is funny to me that two people have commented on how my son might find it embarrassing to have his mom up on stage with him. What you have to understand is my son is only 11 years old. He still thinks I am cool (except when I'm nagging him to do his homework). He's more embarrassed that he is a boy that dances than that I am a mom who has a bit part in his show.
I know this might change one of these days. I'm glad he doesn't think I'm embarrassing to have around. I try to be a cool mom without being a mom who tries too hard to be cool, if you know what I mean.
With my teenage son, it is the reverse. I'm embarrassed to be seen in public with him. Some times he gets into what I call "doofus mode" and I just want to hide. I think it is the overdose of testosterone or something that makes him act more juvenile than his 5 year younger brother.
I still can't focus on blogging and photography. Too much of my energy is invested in getting my NaNo story off the ground. I finally passed the half way point. 25669 words.

Boys 'n Fog

I gift you with a picture.



NaNo word count--more behind target--11,238 words.

Brag Letter

For this week's Sunday Scribblings I am asked to write about how wonderful I am. Here is my best effort.



Last week, a patient told me that I am smart. We were, necessarily, talking about her and it came out as a comparison. I am smarter than she is. I wasn’t doing much to justify the compliment or the comparison. It just came out. Even though I know I am smart the compliment, as always, made me uncomfortable.
I think the discomfort with compliments is commonplace. It doesn’t always reflect low self esteem. In my case it reflects some of the awkwardness I learned as a child who was identified by her peers as being smart or brainy. Yes, being smart means you get the admiration and envy of your peers. But it also means that people minimize your efforts. No A seems earned because a “brain” like you shouldn’t have to work much. Anything less than an A is deemed shameful.
I watched this process happening to my son in elementary school. He learned to feign modesty lest he be judged boastful. He minimized his accomplishments to maintain friendships. Of course, he is also naturally modest and was surprised when I told him recently that he could at least aspire to any college in the country.
I don’t like being asked about my strengths and talents. I hope that they are evident in my words and actions. I don’t tell people I am a good doctor but I hope they think so. Not because I show off knowledge but because I provide care that makes them feel better.
I especially hate it when a prospective employer asks my strengths and weaknesses. It is difficult to walk the fine line between boasting and false modesty. Say too much and you are vain and egotistical. Say too little and you are incompetent. Likewise with the weaknesses. Are you really going to say something that would make you unemployable? I have a temper, I lose things, I forget to return phone calls, or I have problems with authority figures? I don’t think so.
As my older son applies to colleges, the process resonates with my memories of being evaluated in the past. There is the “college love letter” which tells the college why you would love to go there (watch the hyperbole). There is the the challenge of trying to prove how wonderful a candidate you are without saying it in so many words.



Here is one of the Common Application Personal Essays for this year:
Option #5. A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
Try turning this into an interesting, personal, fun, modest yet revealing essay! I hated these essays so much when I was his age that I shut down over one scholarship essay and my mom half wrote it for me. It turned out rather lame and I did not get that particular scholarship. I think my son is doing better.
It occurred to me to answer one of the essay questions out of curiosity and solidarity with my son. Unfortunately for solidarity, I decided I couldn’t post a sample essay. Given the number of highly anxious high school students right now, someone might be tempted to steal my words. I might rise to the challenge after the college application deadlines are long past. Or I might not.

Magic: The Gathering

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I found this quiz on The Eleventh House. I decided to take it in honor of my kids who are very much into Magic. I think green truly is my color although the quiz is a bit random. I also doubt it is the strongest color in the deck.



It is hard to explain Magic to people who don't have experience with the trading card games. Anyone with kids, especially boys over the age of 8 or so, probably has encountered Pokemon or Yugioh. Magic preceded these. It is a bit of an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons game but played as a card game. Imagine the game of War but with complex cards and rules.



It is actually a quite challenging game. Players collect the cards which are issues in a series of releases, sort of like the new season on TV. One can buy preformed decks of cards or small assortments of random cards known as booster packs. The booster packs contain a mixture of common, uncommon and rare cards (proportionally of course) with the common being needful but not powerful and the rare conferring often powerful abilities to a deck. The better players design their own decks to take to tournaments.
A few weeks ago I drove my sons to a Magic tournament. It was an interesting sight. It was held in a conference room in a hotel near the airport. It looked like any other conference room I have been in except for the attendees. Imagine a room full of boys and young adults. Sort of like a poker tournament with hushed voices, people leaning over cards, except younger, and definitely geekier. This is the jeans and t-shirt set. I noticed a few bald heads and beards and a few men closer to my age than my kids.
The room smelled of too many male bodies. With some effort I spotted two brave young women. I admired them for being willing to compete in a nearly all male domain. Talk about social pressure!
I scanned the crowd and couldn't find anyone else as young as my younger son (who is 10). Because he follows my older boy into everything he does, younger son is used to hanging out with the older players. I overheard a discussion between two fellows. One said to the other: "You lost to a 12 year old!" Pipes up my son: "I'm 10." He was rightfully proud of himself.
Older son won his tournament and left with a grand prize of a number of cards. He happens to be a brilliant gamer. Got the math/science genes that run on both sides of his family. (I'll brag a tiny bit. He's doing Calculus at 15). Fortunately, he also inherited a tiny bit of social skills or he'd be totally weird, like, ahem, some of the gamers I saw.

Relax, Max

I was watching my cat sleep today and I was envious. Not of her ability to sleep for 16 hours a day, since I actually resent how much of my day is occupied by required sleeping but of her ability to relax so deeply. Not that she is always relaxed. At the moment she is doing furious battle, saving the world from a rubber band. But I envy those moments of spineless repose, where her only worry is whether dinner will arrive on time.



I’ve been hypnotized during a course on hypnosis and trust me, it is a very relaxed feeling but I doubt I looked that calm. I don’t think I’ve looked that relaxed when asleep since I was an infant and still believed that all was safe in my world. Cats have all the luck.
When my kids were infants, we read to them from a number of board books. Writing a good baby book is quite an art. It might appear easy to the uninformed. After all such a book is rarely more than 20-30 words in length. But that is the point. It has to be readable, not once but a hundred times, aloud. The pictures have to be bold and eye catching, but even more, the words have to have a certain seductive rhythm and tone, like great poetry, only catchier and more accessible. One classic of the genre, "Goodnight Moon", seems dull and lifeless until read aloud. Then the tone and rhythm catch the ear and lull the senses into a state of, see I had a point here, relaxation.
We had our favorite stories, like most families. There were the train books, the dinosaur stories, the bedtime stories. Some were funny, some sweet. Some just outright ridiculous. The queen of silliness has to be Sandra Boynton. Sandra started in the greeting card business I believe. But her board books captured my family’s attention. Our favorite was “But Not the Hippopatamus.” Quoth I:
A hog and a frog
Cavort in the bog.
But not the hippopotamus.
A cat and two rats
Are trying on hats.
But not the hippopotamus.

Doesn’t this remind you of middle school? The best reading of all was when a French family member read it with an exaggerated French accent. We nearly died laughing. I can’t reproduce it well in print but imagine “But not ze ippopotamoose,” and you get the idea.



Another favorite which I have to quote from memory since the book must be in a box somewhere is “Max’s Bedtime” by Rosemary Wells. Max loses his red rubber elephant right before bedtime. His older sister Ruby tries to comfort him with all his other stuffed animals. “ ‘Relax, Max,’ said Ruby. But Max could not relax.” The pictures are great and the story has a happy ending. Max finds his red rubber elephant and goes to sleep. If my child didn’t do as well, it wasn’t Rosemary’s fault.
I still say “Relax, Max” to my kids although I’m not sure they remember the source of the quote. I don’t know if they listen anymore but they did back then.
So we should all learn to relax from cats, and Ruby. After all, life is too short not to waste more of it.

Small town excitement

Even though Chicago is a big city, my neighborhood is a very small town. If I look in the neighborhood phone book I can easily pick out names of people I know. Today was our neighborhood garden fair and there were any number of familiar faces.
Yesterday younger son and I were leaving his school when we noticed fire trucks and large amounts of smoke. We all know that fire trucks in an urban area can mean anything from a heart attack to a false alarm in a public building. But the smoke made it clear this was for real. It had the smell that burning rubber makes.
We immediately decided to park and check it out. Fortunately we could park before we got in the way of the fire trucks. Another less lucky driver had pulled into a driveway to clear the road but then could not get back out. I was a bit surprised that he actually asked the fireman to move his truck to let him out. I mean, really. There's only a burning building and who knows, people at risk. The fireman was up to the task. He told the guy to drive on the sidewalk.
I forgot to mention that as I had been out at a meeting in the far south suburbs yesterday, I actually had my camera with me. So here was my big chance for a little photo journalism.



My first shot of the action was of the firemen unreeling the hose and running toward the back of the building. I could see a man and boy who appeared to be helping with the hose. That struck me as surprising, kind of like the paramedics letting someone help with the CPR. Then I saw the family walking toward me; I couldn't see there faces but they looked shaken up and teary. I guessed that it was their house on fire. I couldn't take pictures of their pain. It just isn't in me. So there goes my career as a photo journalist.
Funny since I talk to people about their pain all the time. I see them cry, see them scared, embarrassed, panicky. When someone apologizes to me about crying in my office, I tell them that's why I keep the Kleenexes and joke that I have stock in Procter Gamble or whoever it is that makes the tissues. In real life I don't own stocks. I once meant a psychiatrist who was chatting with a drug rep about her investments in pharmaceutical companies. This troubled me ethically. I don't want stock in something I prescribe. It seems like a conflict of interest.
Anyway, even though my job in a way gives me a license to pry, I didn't want to pry into the business and pain of someone I didn't have a professional or personal relationship with. Don't you always cringe when there are journalists interviewing the families of a murder victim and so forth? How ghoulish. Not that I'm better than anyone else. I gape at car accidents too.
And here we were going to gape at a fire. There was quite a crowd gathered. This was a real neighborhood event. A number of police, a bunch of local people and the local electric company men who stopped working to gape too. There wasn't much of a show fire-wise. From the front of the building there was little smoke and no flames to be seen. The ladder trucks had their ladders extended into a second floor window and you could hear but not see the firemen breaking out the windows of one apartment. Most of the action was hidden by a tree.
In many ways it was more interesting to people watch. A woman walked by with her two pedigree dogs, one of whom had his leg in a cast. Several people had their cell phones out, probably to call and tell someone about the fire. Some parents were showing their kids what was going on.



My son asked why the people we saw were so upset. I told him I'd be upset if our house were on fire. He replied, why, it's just things? I wisely didn't mention our cats because that would have scared him. He's right, if no one comes to harm, it is just things. But losing one's home to a fire would be devastating nonetheless. Fortunately, judging by idle ambulances and how quickly the fire department was able to start pulling out, it appeared that no one was hurt. With fire hoses and men with axes and picks at the scene, there probably was a fair bit of property damage.
I let my son take some photos too. I figured he'd enjoy it (he has the makings of a fair little photographer) and people would mind him taking pictures less. Although it is a big camera for a little kid. He was a bit too excited to keep the camera still and take the time to focus. Some of his pictures looked more like modern art than photos.



So that's the highlight of my Thursday. How was yours?

Photo hunt--Memory

Recently I found a number of old rolls of print film. I decided to have them digitized because it is so much easier to organize them. This photo represents a memory from around 1999 when my family took a trip up the eastern Lake Michigan coast with a stop on Mackinac Island and then into Canada. I especially liked the Lake Superior area we visited. The kids have grown a tad since then.

AYSO--where children really aren't left behind

AYSO stands for American Youth Soccer Organization

Photo Sharks--Chicago Faces

This new fountain in Chicago's Millennium Park is almost as popular as "Cloud Gate", especially among the kiddies.
By the way, I have a great time posting on these photo memes/challenges but haven't won even an honorable mention yet. It is fun trying to find a photo which meets the challenge.

The Winner of the "Needs to Get a Life" Award

Incidentally, this is my 50th Blog!!! I wasn't sure if I would persevere but it is coming along. We'll see if I'm still going in one year.
No, it is not me who needs to get a life. Or maybe I do, but I'm talking about someone else.
I've been stuck for a topic for a day or two plus too busy with back-to-work woes. Then life gave me a prime rant topic.
Yesterday I was dropping my son off at a class and had double-parked due to lack of parking spaces. Unfortunately I was too close to the car beside me and D. opened the door into the car next to us. Equally unfortunately the car was occupied. Mr. T. as I'll call him got out of his car and inspected the site that was touched by D. It appeared he found some mark because he then came up to the passenger side of my car.
Nice lady that I am I rolled down my window. He then went on a rant about the damage to his car. I said apologetically that I'm sorry, my son was nine and made a mistake. This wasn't good enough for T. The rant went on so long that I became a bit riled up myself. Not for myself but because I felt he was picking on a little kid who made a mistake. Kind of like the people who chew out one's kids for kicking the seat in front of them in an airplane. I mean I'm trying to keep them under control but what am I supposed to do, put barbiturates in their milk?
Mr. T. keeps on raving. "The car isn't even mine" he says. "And I only have 20,000 miles on my car", he says. I reply, "I thought it wasn't your car." "It's my father's." I wish I had thought of something smart to say like "what man your age needs daddy to buy you a Lexus?" but I don't think that fast.
When Mr. T. threatens to call the police, I feel a need to take decisive action. First I tell him derisively that the police will laugh him out of town if he calls them to tell them a 9 year old kid put a mark on his car. I also call him an unprintable name. Unfortunately the 9-year-old already knows mommy uses bad words. I go inspect the mark on his car. It has to be at least a milimeter long!!! Mr. T. tells me there is not a mark on the car. This I doubt. 20,000 driving miles in urban Chicago lead to marks. In Chicago, we park by the touch system, i.e. back up until we touch the car behind us. I look at his back bumper--marked up everywhere. I'm tempted to tell him my car has fewer miles than his but refrain. Mr. T. never stops ranting but my remark about the police changes his tune. Macho men do not like being mocked by the police. He now threatens that he has my license number and wants my insurance information. He also tells him that someone like me is obviously divorced. While I'm trying to figure out a meaningful come-back (after all I've been married for 17 years), Mr. T. gets back in the car and drives off. I fleetingly wondered if he was going to ram my car but was reassured that that would leave a really big mark in "his" car.
The encounter left me shaking (rage, adrenaline, fear, embarrassment). I needed to cool down over hot Starbucks. As I say, some people need to get a life. Or not drive expensive cars in the city.
Yours,
Sarala

Did you like your kid today?

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I think sometimes I am doomed to think too much (hence the blog). But also I am the parent of a teen and work with a number of teens and their parents. These musings started a few weeks ago. I had had a major fight with my son and the next week I had a session with a teen-age boy who has an unhappy relationship with his parents. This is not revealing much private information since many teen-age boys have unhappy relationships with their parents. And this is not really about this boy. It is about me.
I left work that day worried that perhaps my son did not like me. Not because of the one fight but because of the daily accumulation of parenting mistakes. I understand that the parenting involves unpleasant obligations--enforcing chores, homework, setting limits and so forth. It is a dangerous mistake to give up on those obligations in the interest of making your kid like you. But what about those days when you are irritable, arbitrary, unpredictable and irrational? When you probably aren't particularly likeable to anyone? Do these moments do irreparable damage to your relationship with your child? Probably not, if the balance is in the positive direction. A little humility always helps too. Sorry, uh oh and oops do a fair bit to pave the way to mutual tolerance and respect. Kids do not need perfect parents; they need parents who are aware of their own imperfections.
I supressed the urge to ask my son if he likes me. Being insecure because of something that happened in my work day, does not constitute a good reason to launch a heavy discussion. A corollary is never use your child as your therapist. I do not need to impose a brief moment of self-doubt on my child and make him obligated to reassure me.
Well, I got over that moment of weakness. And I think that generally my son does like me. Of course, I am not as noble as I used to be, but in a few more years he will reconnect with the simple fact that I am not as stupid as I sound.
But this incident led my thoughts in another and more important direction. It is nice if your kids like you. It is essential that you like your kids. As a person and a therapist, it is hard to be in the room with a parent who does not appear to like his or her child. Note I say "like." At the moment I am not talking about love, which, of course, is important too. Parents dislike their children for many reasons. Some children are hard to like. They are defiant, explosive, aggressive, lazy, moody, irrational and so forth. But generally any parent should be able to take joy in some aspects of a child's talents, personality, empathy, humor, intellect or inner or outer beauty. I don't know if Jeffrey Dahmer or the Unabomber were likeable as kids, but it is hard to find a child who has nothing to offer. I'm not sure I've ever met one.
So no matter how awful your son or daughter is today, try to like him or her just a bit. Separate their actions from their character. When my older son was a toddler, we used to say to him "Sometimes you do bad things but we still love you." It always amused me that he turned that around and said "Sometimes I do bad things but I still love you." Freudian, huh? For an older child, the message also is "Sometimes you annoy and frustrate the heck out of me, but I still like and respect you for the person you are."
Just a thought. . . .

Belated posting--Lucca, Italy, June 22-23, 2006

June 22-23

More about Lucca. This is not intended to replace a tour guide. First of all, I have no intention of visiting every major tourist site. Others have done this better than I and the kids will not put up with it. Last year we did climb the Torre Guinigi and enjoyed it very much. The view was fantastic and there is a certain romance to trees on top of a tower. There are other towers to be climbed but maybe another trip.
Let me instead tempt you to visit with a description of our breakfast stop. We sit in a café in a small square. Zoning laws in Lucca must be quite interesting. The tables and umbrellas are laid out in the middle of a road. How did this café get permission to do this? Across the square from us is a fountain shaped like a bathtub. People fill their water bottles from a tap on the side. I’m too anxious about GI disturbances to do the same. Not that I doubt that the water is potable, but living in France 20 years ago, I discovered that I avoided minor but chronic GI upset by not drinking tap water and it was well worth the investment in bottled water. My husband thinks I am paranoid.

There is a small church across the way as well. It has some wonderful marble carvings above the arched doors although the walls are unremarkable. A few older women wander in to pray. There are few tourists in this particular square. Next to the church is another ancient building housing the local ambulance corps. The ambulances are parked next to the church walls which is a typical European juxtaposition of ancient and modern. I think you have to come from a historically young country such as the United States to be as strongly struck by these contrasts. The Beatles music playing loudly in the station house adds to the ambiance. Ironically this music seems old fashioned too although in context the Beatles are not exactly antiquarian.
I turn D loose with his camera. He is especially taken by the semi-feral cat in the door of the café. The cat’s fur is matted and he looks unkempt so D feel sorry for him. I explain that this does not mean the cat is necessarily neglected. Proof arrives as a woman walks by, opens a can of cat food into a dish outside the café and then walks on. The cat and pigeons appreciate the food. D tells me the cat is related to our cat at home because he cleans himself like ours does.
Today we buy Legoes at a toy store. Not exactly the quintessential Italian souvenir but I too think Lego Bionicles are toys worth having especially if it buys a happy child for a few moments. I take a photo of an interesting shop window. It commemorates the on-going World Cup with soccer balls and shoes entirely in chocolate. The photo does not do justice to the window (or the chocolate).
For lunch we meet our friends who spend their mornings studying Italian while we loll about. We eat at a local pizzeria (run by Brazilians). This year they are understandably proud of their new air-conditioning. This is a rarity in Lucca and makes the pizza go down a lot more easily on a hot afternoon.
After lunch a brief swing into the Anfiteatro for a gelato. Local gelato is as good as reputation would have it. My favorites are frutti di bosco (literally wood fruit–actually mixed berries) and fragola (strawberry). The kids love chocolate. Mint is D’s current favorite.
The afternoon entails a return to Marlia. The kids head directly to the pool. One recent afternoon I hiked into the hills above the Azienda. This is a longer hike than I had anticipated. There are some tempting small towns up the hill and I have been wishing to see the church attached to the tower I can see from our house. The roads are unbelievably winding and I never did arrive at the tower in question. After multiple switch backs I arrived at a different church in a different small town.
A foreigner hiking up these hills must be quite a sight. I felt that everyone is staring at me wondering what I am up to. It was hard to take pictures for the same reason. The Tuscan stone farm houses are striking to my eye but I had trouble doing them justice with my untutored photography skills. I was also shy about photographing someone’s house in too obvious a manner.
One older gentleman who was putting chemicals on his grape vines tried to strike up a conversation. He might have been asking where I was coming from and I tell him I am from the Azienda. In retrospect he was probably asking which country I am from. He seemed to think I am either German, British or Dutch. It mystified me that anyone could believe I am Dutch. With my dark skin, hair and eyes, I look more stereotypically Mediterranean than the fair colored Tuscans. I think American hikers are less common around here. I don’t know if I managed to convince him that I am from the United States. We part in mutual, amicable confusion. I wish I had better Italian language skills and more understanding of the local etiquette. As on many days, that one ended with hungry children demanding why I had not returned hours ago to feed them.
Ciao.

Back to school week

Sometimes it is a little hard to say good-bye to summer and vacation. Even though I am no longer in school myself, 32 years of continuous education are hard to let go of. I find myself envying teachers who still get the summers off (even if they pay for it financially). I am launching two children into back-to-school mode tomorrow complete with new pencil boxes, backpacks and spiral notebooks. It is a bonding experience to be in office supply stores the night before school starts with all the other worn-out looking parents.
This summer, as my Blog and pictures attest, I have been in two foreign countries, and three states besides the one I live in. Sometimes the contrasts were dramatic. The Pacific Northwest Coast is a far cry from Las Vegas and the national parks of Utah. So you might ask, am I sufficiently spoiled to wish I didn't have to go back to work and the routine chores of getting two children off to school, after school activities and monitoring homework? The answer must be, yes! It is not just a fear of work after all. It is maybe even more a fear of winter. Yes, winter hits hard and fast here in the midwest and lasts far too long. Sometimes I think I can feel my mood sink as fast as the sun starts setting on the shortened days.
Well, seasonal affective disorder keeps me in business winters. As does school phobia, bullying, shyness, short attention spans, anxiety and other symptoms of the back to school season. Two wishes I have in my clinical practice are: (1) Insurance companies would pay for winter trips to the Carribean for people with documented seasonal affective disorder. (2) School could be a kinder, gentler place for children. Yes, I might be a bit less busy at work but wouldn't we all be a little bit happier?
Now back to household obligations. . . .

Mushrooms and fungi and slugs, oh my!!

Dorothy, we're not in Tuscany any more! Since the last time I blogged, I have returned home to Chicago, worked for a month and climbed back on a plane to Seattle. One can infer from this that I do not blog during work weeks and that I travel a lot. So what do slugs have to do with this?

Today, I am posting from the Pacific Northwest coast near Pacific Beach, Washington. This is a marked contrast to the beaches of Italy. For one, it is not hot, there are no crowds, no beach umbrellas and one is more likely to see a banana slug than a topless woman sunning herself. (I deny all responsibility for that free association). Fortunately the banana slug was willing to pose for a picture.

As I walked back from the beach today, I thought of naming today's blog, "This land is my land. . ." Not that I claim ownership. More that it owns me. These are the beaches that I grew up on. The water is numbingly cold and it is nearly impossible to get a tan. But I feel a sense of belonging on these beaches.

As a child, I used to backpack near here. At night we would camp on the beach and listen to the waves and the foghorn. During the days we would explore the sea stacks, climb on the piles of driftwood logs and look for agates and sea shells. One of my favorite memories is of finding a floating log in a small creek flowing into the ocean and spending much of a day poling it around.

Sometimes sharing these places and experiences with my own children makes me feel closer to this land. Other times I realize how far away I have moved. Today I learned that my younger son is afraid of kelp. How can that be? I guess we do not have kelp in Lake Michigan. I suppose kelp is a little slimy (but not compared to the above-mentioned slug), but it does have its charms. Did you know that you can make a pipe out of a large piece of kelp and blow on it like a ram's horn? Smaller kelp are fun to pop, like bubble wrap.

As elsewhere, sometimes people manage to spoil paradise. Some 15 miles from here is Ocean Shores. This is a small town with an incredibly long sandy beach. Since the beach is open to vehicles, from motor bikes to SUV's to campers, it more resembles the parking lots outside Disneyland than a chance to commune with nature. If any kelp are left on this beach, they have surely all been popped.

So don't come visit here, unless you plan on walking softly and parking well away from the beach. And bring a jacket and rain gear. You likely will need it.

Until next time.