Beach Week

If you happened to notice my absence from the internet as of late, even though I'm not on AIM as much as I used to be anyway, that's because I was too busy not being very busy at all and chilling at the beach. (You'd have known this if you followed me on Twitter -- add me, someone!) My parents have a really nice beach house in Delaware that's about a mile walk from the ocean, which looks out onto a beautiful canal often used for crabbing, kayaking, and boating. Unfortunately, this is a great selling point, and my dad rents it out for most of the summer. This year, however, some family friends of ours convinced him to leave a week open so we could all go down for a nice, relaxing vacation.

Last Friday my parents, my brother, my dog, and I left for our traditional summer getaway. There were people renting the place until Saturday, so we stayed the first night at my grandfather's beach house up the street. His place is nice and holds a lot of fond memories, but ever since my parents bought the other one a few years ago it just doesn't compare in terms of size and location. So the next day we repacked our stuff and moved into my parent's beach house with the other family to start our vacation.

The best thing about the beach, and something we made sure to do nearly every day, is simply gathering our necessary equipment (towels, blankets, umbrellas, chairs, shovels, boogie boards, skim boards, etc.), walking down to the ocean, and spending hours going back and forth between swimming and laying on the sand. No worrying about work, appointments, or even time in general if you don't want to. It's something that might generate a lot of "necessary" consuming like boogie boards and skim boards, but you could do without a lot of that stuff and still have a great time. One thing that I definitely cannot avoid buying is sun block.. because I am a ghost out there, and as soon as I take off my shirt the sun is raping me. Luckily, my burns were minimal this time around, and I might have even got a fraction of a percentage darker. Yay!

When I wasn't at the ocean, I was most likely exercising, studying, or playing video games. The first is something that shocked even me for how quickly it became part of my daily routine again after a couple week hiatus, a routine that involves running and stretching in addition to pushups and crunches, but I'll save the details for another post. My trip to Japan is ever-approaching so naturally I'm forcing myself to study the language more and more. Currently, the sources are coming from class textbooks and a podcast I listen to, but I'll probably utilize a CD program before the summer ends. When feeling really reclusive I would play some video games, such as Mario 64 which I had gone back to and recently finally beat. My friend in the other family brought his XBOX 360, so we spent many hours strolling through the streets of Liberty City on GTA4 as well.

Apart from our initial two families, we met up with some other people as well. My brother had a friend from school who was staying in a hotel down the street, so he came to our beach and walked around with us a few times, but it was kind of strange because he stayed quiet most of the time and just sort of tagged along. The other family invited some of their friends to stay in my grandfather's beach house (with his permission), one family of which was visiting from Britain. It was interesting to hear some of the differences in terminology, but my favorite had to be referring to "bathing suits" for women as "bathing costumes." XD!! Oh yeah, and if you ever hear the phrase "taking a mick," that means that you're mocking an English person. <.<

So what else did I do? I finally saw The Dark Knight, which was awesome, and I'm definitely planning on seeing it again. I went to the Ocean City boardwalk and walked approximately 84 blocks, or about 8 miles, until my feet just about fell off. I got a call from the airline that my flight to Japan was cancelled so I had to book a new itinerary that now includes a stop to Guam to see my girlfriend. I got sick the last couple days after my dad dusted off all the fans in the house, and still have a sore throat and stuffy nose. And then on Saturday, I came home, after being sick enough to give up on my exercise routine once again. :p

Ah well, overall a very nice temporary distraction for my life.