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elfsTuesday, Omaha gets us up around ten or so and we all get dressed. Kouryou is sweet and wonderful and quite accomodating. She has just been a miracle the whole trip. So we go out to a kind of breakfast and lunch; I try to eat well, only eating half of a roast beef sandwich and having fresh fruit as my side dish. I've discovered how hard it is to eat well on vacation. The real trick is to not eat much at all.
After breakfast, Omaha's dad heads out to do his own thing and Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I all go over to Omaha's old haunt, the Clearwater Marine Science Center. Kouryou-chan watches the ancient turtles (one clearly hit by a motorboat can't get his hind quarters under water) and then there's a brief show with a domesticated dolphin (born and raised in captivity) who's at the Science Center recovering from some disease and being trained to go into the adult show circuit. He's very cute and talented and you can't help but wonder if he's really any happier where he than in the wild.
Afterwards, we head to the beach, where we spend two hours slathered in sunscreen and somehow manage to avoid getting burned. I get lots of videotape of Kouryou-chan making a sandcastle. Omaha and I swim out into the Gulf of Mexico, only about a hundred yards or so. I had forgotten how warm the Gulf waters are. For that matter, I'd forgotten how hot and muggy Florida is. It's murder on my accomodated-to-Seattle temperament. I'd also forgotten my swim trunks so now I own a ridiculous pair of yellow trunks. Fortunately, nobody gets any pictures of them.
We get home, drop of Kouryou-chan with her grandfather, then run to Costco to get forty or so prints of the 400 images we brought with us on CD-ROM. Some of her relatives don't own computers. (Gasp, Shock, Horror!)
We decide on Chinese Take-Out. This seems like a good idea until I discover that Omaha's father has never done Chinese Take-Out before and is unaware of how this ritual is performed. He drives off to make sure they get it right rather than phone it in. When he gets the meal, he doesn't check for the contents and my dumplings are missing, so while we eat, he drives back to make sure they hand him what he ordered.
Omaha and I leave Kouryou-chan with the grandparents (the one time in our life we'll be able to do this) and I finally get to watch The Matrix: Reloaded. Oh, it's a lovely piece of eye-candy, and the philosophy isn't terribly deep at all. In fact, the reviewer at National Review made a serious error in his review when he described it as "fatalistic." It is not. In fact, there's a fine but important distinction that he fails to make (deliberately, I suspect, because he has the Christian notion of free will but I'll get to that) between fatalism and determinism. More on that in a future article. But it was very nice, and I have to admit that the effects did indeed blow me away.
We got home and went to bed. I didn't sleep very well. Is there some rule that says that every home in Florida has to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures?
After breakfast, Omaha's dad heads out to do his own thing and Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I all go over to Omaha's old haunt, the Clearwater Marine Science Center. Kouryou-chan watches the ancient turtles (one clearly hit by a motorboat can't get his hind quarters under water) and then there's a brief show with a domesticated dolphin (born and raised in captivity) who's at the Science Center recovering from some disease and being trained to go into the adult show circuit. He's very cute and talented and you can't help but wonder if he's really any happier where he than in the wild.
Afterwards, we head to the beach, where we spend two hours slathered in sunscreen and somehow manage to avoid getting burned. I get lots of videotape of Kouryou-chan making a sandcastle. Omaha and I swim out into the Gulf of Mexico, only about a hundred yards or so. I had forgotten how warm the Gulf waters are. For that matter, I'd forgotten how hot and muggy Florida is. It's murder on my accomodated-to-Seattle temperament. I'd also forgotten my swim trunks so now I own a ridiculous pair of yellow trunks. Fortunately, nobody gets any pictures of them.
We get home, drop of Kouryou-chan with her grandfather, then run to Costco to get forty or so prints of the 400 images we brought with us on CD-ROM. Some of her relatives don't own computers. (Gasp, Shock, Horror!)
We decide on Chinese Take-Out. This seems like a good idea until I discover that Omaha's father has never done Chinese Take-Out before and is unaware of how this ritual is performed. He drives off to make sure they get it right rather than phone it in. When he gets the meal, he doesn't check for the contents and my dumplings are missing, so while we eat, he drives back to make sure they hand him what he ordered.
Omaha and I leave Kouryou-chan with the grandparents (the one time in our life we'll be able to do this) and I finally get to watch The Matrix: Reloaded. Oh, it's a lovely piece of eye-candy, and the philosophy isn't terribly deep at all. In fact, the reviewer at National Review made a serious error in his review when he described it as "fatalistic." It is not. In fact, there's a fine but important distinction that he fails to make (deliberately, I suspect, because he has the Christian notion of free will but I'll get to that) between fatalism and determinism. More on that in a future article. But it was very nice, and I have to admit that the effects did indeed blow me away.
We got home and went to bed. I didn't sleep very well. Is there some rule that says that every home in Florida has to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures?
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Date: 2003-07-19 12:00 am (UTC)Oh, and did you notice the decal on the side of one of the semitrailer trucks?