Vacation Tidbits

As I unpack, do laundry, and scramble back to work, I leave you with a few quirky stories from our week at the beach:

On the first night, I got up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. I didn't have my contacts in or glasses on, so I groped my way through the dark bedroom to the bathroom. I saw something scuttle by the shower door. Through my blurry/sleepy vision, it looked like a two-inch long...bug...or something. OH MY GOODNESS, what if it's a roach and this place is infested? It was a very nice condo, but you never know! Oh NO, we have roaches! Big, prehistoric ROACHES!

I scrambled back to bed and shook Jack awake to go in there and investigate. He let out a man-shriek and yelled back that the "roach" was just a "lizard." PERFECT! I love sleeping with salamanders! It was a baby, just a tiny lizard, but STILL. I don't like creatures that aren't invited.

On the third night, still festering about my growing list of responsibilities at the hospital, I found myself unable to sleep. Earlier that day, I received a request from the Muppet system CMO, asking me to spearhead a systemwide grant proposal. Yikes! The system CMO kind of scares me and totally intimidates me, so I actually did lose sleep over it. Growing weary of my tossing and turning, Jack finally asked me what the problem was. I told him that I couldn't stop my brain from spinning. He told me to count sheep. I told him I was too busy counting meetings. Clever, eh?

Every morning after my beach walk, I sipped my morning coffee and nibbled my bagel on the huge porch that overlooks the bay (and sunrise). Every morning, the same sneaky gull (?) visited me and inched increasingly close to my bagel. I named him Lender and repeatedly chased him off with a pool noodle:

On the last full day, SkyBlue and I went parasailing. Oh, did I mention that my folks went on vacation with us? We had a great time, made phenomenal memories, and best of all, no one killed each other. One of Mom's greatest fears and wildest dreams was to go parasailing. Except that the weather didn't cooperate, delivering high winds most of the trip (thank you, Ida!). On Friday, the winds subsided enough to allow us a safe flight. After the bone-jarring boat ride out to the Gulf, the skipper informed us it was far too dangerous to fly over the Gulf. So we turned around and went out to the bay side of the island. Another 20 minutes of jaw-clenching, stomach-churning, gut-wrenching boating, we arrived at our destination. In 20 mph winds (and 4-6 foot seas), we grabbed onto the bar and were hoisted up by the sails. We soared higher...and higher...and higher until I really thought we were going to snap off the rope and sail on to The Great Beyond (it's next to Bed, Bath, and Beyond).

The Skipper left us up there, teetering on the bring of No Return, for a good 25 minutes. While this was a phenomenal bang for my buck, I couldn't help but imagine what I would look like if I barfed from that high up in the air. The wind would dramatically swing the parachute to the right, dropping as we swung to the left, a wonderful recipe not only for adventure, but for an upset stomach! Graciously, he coiled in the rope and we landed without incident. Wrapping myself in a towel, he told us that we went nearly 800 feet up. 800 FEET! WAS HE CRAZY! No wonder this was our view:

More vacation stories to come when I finish digging myself out of the inevitable, inescapable pit of work to be completed for work tomorrow.

So Take These Broken Wings

Driving to class tonight, I heard that Mister Mister song from the 80's, "Take These Broken Wings" or something to that effect. This song will be forever linked to a bird I encountered today.

One of my co-workers, The Edge, and I park next to each other every single day at work. Her car is blue, mine is black. Both were dirty. This morning, however, there was a terribly-confused robin who fluttered between our cars. She was either sick, hurt, had a broken wing, was schizophrenic, or was trying to mate with our vehicles. For hours, she fluttered back and forth between The Edge's car and mine, happily crapping along the way. It seemed as though she was trying to get into my car, perhaps confused by the sunroof. Did she *know* about the 50 lbs of birdseed I have stashed in my tire well? I ran out there at lunch, glanced at the cars, and went on my way.

Around 2 p.m., The Edge returned from lunch and alerted me to the bird's fury. Insane Robin was steadily becoming more and more upset, fluttering faster. The Edge said there were scratches on the cars and that she was loading her Red Ryder BB gun that she stole from Ralphie last Christmas. Laughing as I walked out the door to survey the damage, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this:

Yes, you see correctly. Those would be scratches in the clearcoat. So much for having a shiny new car. [You can kind of see my new patent leather shoes in the reflection, though]. Luckily, Jack has some buffing compound and most of the scratches *should* be erasable. I don't think my insurance policy covers Insane Robin scratches. I'm hardly superstitious, but what would they have thought if, in Biblical times, a schizophrenic finch scraped up a chariot? All Hitchcock references aside, I will now definitely be wary of mentally-imbalanced birds.