S.E.X. and the beach!

I had a good day yesterday. Pretty good anyway.

Our company doesn't give out bonuses, but they do give days off you can win through a drawing. I won the drawing for last month because I had the most perfect attendance for April. Someone up above must have been watching out for me, because I've been so stressed out lately that I really needed a day off to feel normal. And that day was yesterday. And, what better place for a suffering Scorpio to readjust than at the beach? So, I stumbled out the house at 6:30, went and picked up my mom, and off we went

This is where we went. Breezy Point beach. I think I've talked about it before, right? Anyway. It was nice to go there in the morning. On a weekday when there weren't 900 people there. It was warm yesterday, but not too hot. Not even a greenhead fly. Even the water wasn't too cold. It was a good day. It's the best beach for fossil-hunting, and it didn't disappoint. I added at least 60 shark teeth, some petrified wood, and some dental plates from rays to my collection (kept in a box with a cross stitch motif on it, LOL--I join my passions). And that was just in two hours, most of which I wasn't really looking that hard.

It was nice to have time to be with my mom and just talk and relax, and remember how we went to New Jersey when I was young. She laughed a little about how my father wanted them to buy a beach house up there, and she said no because she didn't think they could afford the whopping price tag of $75K, and she thought they would lose their shirt. She asked me if I remembered those days and I do. I can remember seeing Annie up there and Fox and the Hound, which is still one of my two favorite Disney movies. And how we'd walk through town and get Irish Potato candy from a store where the A/C unit was up in the air and it would drip on you (funny what you remember). And there was a guy who, everyday, would do these beautiful, intricate sandcarvings, and he would decorate them with bits of shell. And we'd eat cornflakes with blueberries in them and think that was Heaven. Mom said she was so glad she instilled a love of the ocean in me; I'm glad she did, too.

I was trying to get home at a reasonable time to eat dinner with SO, so we left at a little before noon, and, after a drive through the coastal communities there--Mom realized she knew where we were, because, before us, she and my father had a boat and they kept it docked in Deale, just up the road (please note, they did not have that boat when I was young. They had kids and became land-locked. My parents lost their cool factor, I guess.)--we went to my LNS. It's been MONTHS since I've been there, and it was kinda bizarre to step in. Normally, I just walk in and know where to go. But yesterday, I just wandered around. I didn't buy much. The monthly supply kit for the freebie, the one for last month, a Bent Creek Photobooth of a pig and a Chicken, and a leaflet of ornaments for my mom, along with the new At Home with Needlework. That's a really good, not to miss issue. I'm normally ambivalent about it, but it was a pleasant surprise.

They did have a trunk show of BOAF needepoint canvases. I drooled over those for a while. A lot of them were the same as their cross stitch charts, but there were some I hadn't seen. A Toile Rabbit--was that ever released as a chart? Anyone know? And a Red Riding Hood. I seriously thought about purchasing those too. Even though I have no real experience in needlepoint. But then I remembered I have a room of unfinished cross stitch, and no experience, and a tight budget, and I thought better. I can always go back and get them, right?