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Where are the real mermaids?
You can be anything you want to be, even a mermaid. You think I’m joking? Skye is a mermaid. She says this with all seriousness. She’s worked very hard to become one and has plans for her future mermaiding. Weeki Wachee Springs (now a Florida state park) is home to the original mermaids. It boasts a clear water spring that is 72-degrees year round, an underwater amphitheater, and a long history of mermaids (even Elvis was a fan!). We took Skye for her 4 year old birthday, where she discovered that mermaids were real and, after seeing one of the mermaids putting on her tail, figured out that she too…
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The Changing Sky
Flying over America you watch snaking rivers, pointed mountains, large deserts sprinkled with towns, and patchwork farms slide underneath. Of course, mostly you read or distract yourself from the journey, peering out only now and then to get your bearings below. Driving, however, is different. You have to pay attention to the road and the areas around you. You see how the landscape changes, sometimes slowly and sometimes with the passage of a river over to a new world. You climb into the shadows of snaggled mountains, blink into the blinding light reflecting from ice and snow. Most of all, you see the sky. In the east, the sky is…
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The Cleaning Supplies Closet
One thing about living in a house, you have space for things. Sometimes, these are nice things to have, like a normal size broom. On the boat, I had a handheld vacuum and a hand broom. In the house, I not only have full-sized versions of both, but also a mop and swiffer and a whole closet dedicated to storing cleaning supplies. This seems like a somewhat decadent use of space, coming from a 30-something foot sailboat. I spend a fair amount of time as we settle into our home thinking about what we really need. I’m absolutely in favor of things that make life easier – cleaning with a…
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Up We Go
“Your plane.” An RV-8 is a sports car of an airplane if there ever was one. And this one was set up for formation aerobatics. At the moment, however, I was in command as my boss was nose deep in the auto pilot computer. Not that I had to do much. In theory, the auto pilot should take us all the way almost to touch down without any effort. All I had to do was keep an eye on things and be able to react if something went wrong. The plane turns a perfect final, lining up with the runway. I watch the manual controls and the outside as we…
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Telling Tall Tales
“A tall tale,” I’m explaining to Skye, “is a tale that is so outsized or exaggerated that it is difficult to believe, and may stretch the truth.” We are discussing Paul Bunyan, who seems to be popular in the area. Of course, she wants an example. “Well, we’re going to go on a vacation, Skye, where we drive from somewhere that is almost always sunny to somewhere it seems to rain all the time. On that trip, we’re going to play in water that bubbles up from the ground at exactly the right temperature for a bath. We’re going to play on a beach covered with tiny tumbled rocks instead…
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Aerial Silks
“I’m here because I need more playtime,” another student in the class said, in response to the teacher’s query about why we were standing there, on a Saturday morning, using stretchy bands to warm up our shoulders and feet. Really, I thought, that sums it up well for all of us. Silks looks gorgeous when seen on the screen and, while the performers certainly make it look easy, you know there’s a lot more going on. We start climbing the silks and I can tell that even the work I’ve been doing on the pull-up bar is not enough, the silks are different. They use different muscles, require more core…
Bonnie Sea
