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Beachlife Today

January 26, 2009 By 3 Comments
After the “bone chilling” cold of last week the temperatures are back in the temperate 60s.  Still, some beachlifers have higher aspirations:
When we first moved to Atlantic Beach and were being shown around by our Realtor we giggled at seeing the people out and about wearing hats and mittens when temps were in the mid 50s.  He, being from Ohio and therefore someone who understands winters, said of them, a bit mockingly, “They think it’s winter here.”  Oh how we laughed, exhilarated by the idea of moving here, where the prospect of winter temps in the 50s, 60s, and even 70s was thrilling. Since living here and indeed loving it, we do know that the cold can come but it never lasts very long.  We actually like a bit of a freeze as it kills off the insects that can become real pests come warm weather.  It’s like a natural cleansing.  I’m sorry to say that we have become them, though.  You can find me shivering with my parka and mittens on even if I just drive through Starbucks. Pathetic.  I know.
Today there was a swell and several surfers were wet suiting up to catch some waves.  It was misty and it felt chillier than its 67 degrees, but was a pretty afternoon on the beach.

Playing with the iPhone app Camera Bag:
The second image is a copy of the first, using the Helga format, taken on Atlantic Beach this afternoon.  

The last two shots are identical; the last of the two is using Camera Bag’s Helga setting. Camera Bag is a fun and inexpensive app with about a dozen settings to play with. 

Do you like ‘Helga’s’ images?  How fun is this, for a camera phone?!

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Just Snow Already

January 21, 2009 By 2 Comments

Indulge me a moment, if you will, while I complain about the cold weather.  I know, I live in Florida and enjoy a lovely Atlantic beachlife, but it’s totally cold here.  I realize that much of the country is suffering from frigid temperatures and a very cold winter overall but we just aren’t prepared for temperatures near 20 degrees.  It kills our tropical plants if we don’t cover them (I do get rather attached to my landscape, particularly my Pygmy date palms and gingers).  But the worst thing about the cold is the cold in this house.


It’s not warm in here. What’s the problem?  Could it be the high ceilings?  Is the heat that is pouring continuously from the furnace (there go the Benjamins) gathering up there?  It is, as it’s cozy warm in the house’s second story, in the kids’ rooms, but in the Master bedroom the temperature last night was fifty-eight degrees when I dove into bed and under the covers. That’s 58 degrees in the room, when it was in the 20s outside.  Other rooms in this house are absolutely frosty.  We cannot even go into our “sun room”.  I can feel the brisk air from that room creeping into the kitchen from the crack between the french doors that separate the rooms.  It’s too bad, too, since that’s where the family TV is (and it’s a good TV, too, a new one, a big one…but no one wants to brave the cold in there.)

We are shivering in front of the space heaters several hours a day.  And for the first time ever (last night) I kept the space heater running in the bedroom all night long.  I don’t mind chilly when I’m sleeping but fifty-eight degrees?  Um, no.

Tonight it promises to be even colder and the weather reports this is the coldest cold this area’s seen in a quarter century.  We’ve been living Atlantic beachlife for eight winters now and while it has gotten colder at times than I’d thought Florida would be, it’s not been like this.  At this point I wish it would just snow and thrill the kids.  You should have heard them this morning when I pointed out a frozen puddle.  Heck, you should have heard me this morning when I saw it.  Then I drove past an unfortunate neighbor’s house,  who’d forgotten the irrigation was set to ‘on’ and had a lovely icile-laden landscape.  It really was quite the scene, here at the beach.  Being from the north I’m familiar with such vignettes but the kids I had with me were thrilled.  

My lovely little Weather Bug app on the iPhone indicates the temperatures are on the way up for later in the week and on into the weekend.  It appears things will be back where they belong for the third week of January. I check this thing several times a day (it’s 33 degrees at the moment) which means it’s officially just five degrees colder than it is in Michigan (home state).  This is global warming?  Weather Bug predicts a low of 20 degrees here in Atlantic Beach tonight.  

Certainly we’re fortunate that we do have a (fairly) warm place to sleep; we aren’t sleeping outside or in a shelter.  But I’ll be happy when the frost is off our windows and it no longer feels like the outside, inside.  
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Just Me and My Shadow…

January 10, 2009 By 1 Comment



…waving hello to you.

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December 10, 2008 By 1 Comment

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Sure It’s All Fun and Games…

December 4, 2008 By 5 Comments


… til Someone Gets Hurt, Mother


Recently, we (that would be me) here at Atlantic Beachlife subjected the children to the annual Christmas card photography torture session.  

The good times start with Mother in a calm state.  She tells her children of her plan for the day’s activity which is met with much grousing and bargaining for postponement,  but she will not be deterred. They are smart children.  They know that mother’s calm spirit is a contrived attempt to infuse this obligatory photo session which will be lengthy and repetitive, with false cheer.  That Mother’s happy and upbeat demeanor will crumble at the first sign of their resistance, and she will become the tense and hissing woman they remember from previous family photo sessions. They wisely cooperate.  She promises early to take them to McDonald’s so as to prime their moods and elicit the facial expressions and body language that make for a happy looking trio.  She promises that if everyone plays their part well, it will be over quickly.

Because they are now older children she tells them straightaway that she means to take many photos, like, a lot, like, hundreds, because it takes hundreds, in fact, to get that one perfect shot (the one that will please her).  They get it.   They understand.  They allow their hair to be combed, pony tailed, gelled.  They wear the clothes she commands them to wear.  They get into the car.

All is going well so far.  Mother feels optimistic.  She drives to her favorite site; a place that allows for changes of scenery beachside.  Dune grass.  Palm trees.  Bench.  Sand and sea.  This gives Mother the options she wants.

Soon she has the children posing, and her voice remains friendly, coaxing.  She remembers to smile when she directs them to stand over here, no, no, put her in the front of you two…closer, turn your head just a bit…no, not you, you keep looking straight at me and keep smiling, just keep smiling, now you, will you put your arm across his shoulder, yes!  just like that, great, okay, oops, your eyes were closed, okay you two just stay like that…hey!  look at me, there we go, good, great. No!  Stop doing that, you are trying too hard, look relaxed, don’t clench, okay that’s better. Everyone!  Look at me and smile, okay, let’s move over here, why are you squinting? Okay, yes I can see that, the sun’s in your eyes, let’s move to the dune but no!  Stop climbing the dune, stop it now, it’s a crime to disturb the sea oats so come down now, there we go, now why don’t you all hold hands, keep them low, down by your sides, put the little one in the middle and just hold hands in a relaxed way.  Stop squeezing her hand, that hurts her, oh no.  NO.  Don’t cry, please don’t cry, if you cry it will take longer and I won’t let you get the milkshake, okay?  Okay?  Good, good, here we go now… And so on.  
Mother commands pose after pose, and the children, they are good, they cooperate so nicely. Mother is thinking that this is going much better than last year, when she screeched and berated the children when they fussed and fidgeted.  Mother is determined to be a better mother this time out as she does not want their childhood holiday memories to be of her scowling on the backside of a camera. Mother thinks this should be fun!  And if not fun, at least, bearable.  Capped with a happy memory of a Happy Meal.  Mother is old enough to realize that memories can be selective, so she does her best to maintain her photographer’s composure.  She cajoles them when she feels like snapping at them. She only curses to herself.  (She knows they are only children and cannot read her mind.)


For an hour she has them standing, prancing, sitting, looking at her, looking away from her, and finally, running toward her.  This elicits another round of directions from Mother as she sets the camera to ‘continuous’ and urges them to come running toward her time and time again, back and forth. She shouts the appropriate encouragement: look at me, keep holding hands now, look over at me, look back at me and keep smiling! she repeats, as the camera stutters off round after round of these splendid poses.   And then, it happens:
On perhaps their twelfth or sixteenth pass by her in her favorite ‘running toward me’ pose, the little one skids to the sand.  Face down. 
 This is a child who does not shake things off quickly.  This is the child who generally cannot be wheedled out of a crying snit.  Crying snits come easily to this one.  In an instant she is awash in tears and snot.  And sand.  All mixed up.
Game over.
This injury is more emotional than physical, the humiliation of falling suddenly face down into the sand, mid-run, mid-smile, camera catching her startling thud so perfectly.  She would not like seeing that.
Mother attempts vainly to staunch the flow with soothing words, but she knows this child is unlikely to acquiesce to mother’s urging her toward composure before she herself is ready to leave her wounded feelings behind.  So they quit the session for good, Mother thinking that if she didn’t get at least one good picture from these tens of hundreds she shot, well…
Well, she didn’t have to think of the options.  When Mother transferred the photos she noted that she only shot exactly 201, and of those 201, precisely two made the cut for Kid Photo 2008:
To these lovely children who suffered Mother’s whims all afternoon (because she made them go to Target with her after all that):  thank you.
Mother loves you!
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November 29, 2008 By 4 Comments

Black Friday, Indeed


What is wrong with some people?  Here in the United States of America…lining up in the middle of the night, thronging outside the doors of Wal-Marts everywhere, straining with excitement as the clock ticks toward that much-hyped magic hour of 5:00am.  The tension builds, the crowds yearn to get in there, to race toward their treasured items, tick-tock-tick-tock…it’s almost there…and then, yes! 5:00am and store employees open the doors, the crowd goes wild, becomes savage, tearing through the entryway, damn anyone who’s in their way, jostling and shoving and finally, yes, finally knocking over people and trampling right over them, leaving someone for dead.

That’s right here in the United States.  Our civilized country, year 2008.

I hope you are happy, you Long Island Wal-Mart shoppers at that store. You know who you are.  You trampled a person to death to get to your plasma TV or your digital camera or whatever the heck it was that you had to have.  There are stories of several people knocked to the floor while you all streamed over their prone bodies, unwilling to stop in your material pursuits to assist an injured pregnant woman, or a man who ended up dead an hour later at a local hospital.  Did you think about that while you were standing in line, probably nudging your cart against others for your precious spot?

This whole Black Friday hype is sickening to me.  I love shopping, I am a shopper to the core, but I hate being played by retailers and when we become a nation so driven by our material desires that we are willing to run with our anxious feet over other people’s human bodies in order to be the ones to grab a low priced plasma TV or whatever it is we want: you can have it.  You make me sick.

I love stuff.  I love things. I love a deal, even.  Yes, I’m a material girl but I would never ever trample another person to get my things.  The reports say Wal-Mart is examining store video in order to see who, exactly, were those culpable in the trampling of the dead man.  

I say, “People:  you know who you are.” 
Shame on you.
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November 12, 2008 By 3 Comments


Nothing’s Perfect…

(and somehow it feels just right)

So I won the Anthropologie Latte Bowls in Blissfest’s recent Auction for Nie Recovery.

The Latte bowls that Stephanie Nielson wrote so tantalizingly about in her own blog.  She rhapsodized about their beautiful colors.  Their delighful sizes.  And the way they fit so nicely into small hands.

And if one broke, that was okay with her.  She’d sweep up the mess, put the pieces aside, dreaming of a future art project comprised of her ‘broken latte pieces’.

That post of hers was so touching when I first read it, before Blissfest ever advertised the auction.  Not living in Mesa made bidding on some of the items impractical.  But then I spied those latte bowls and had to have them for my own.  By then I had fallen in love with Stephanie and her family.  So I bid, and won!  Thrill.

But as is typical with me, I just couldn’t just sit and wait for those bowls to arrive, so…I arranged to be walking past an Anthropologie store a couple of days later.  And ducked in and picked up six of these beauties which together with my “Nie” bowls would indeed comprise a collection of my own:




The auction bowls arrived a few weeks later and when I excitedly opened the box and unwrapped each bowl, I laughed out loud to see the red one in pieces.  My daughter wanted to glue them together but I told her, no, let’s do something with them, glue bits to our ongoing ‘terra cotta pot’ collage (mine looks like a kindergarten art project) or… something.  No, somehow it’s right that one arrived in pieces.

I wanted the bowls because I wanted to somehow feel close to Stephanie.  And her attitude toward the bowls was, hey, if they break, they break.  Sweep ’em up, put ’em aside, and maybe do something artful with them later on.  Don’t worry about it.  It’s all part of the experience.  

And I got to be part of ‘the experience’, too, now.  See?  With that lovely broken bowl, amidst the still perfect ones, I am relishing both cuteness and imperfection, wholeness and brokenness, both the small joys of pretty things coupled with their ultimate irrelevance in the context of what’s really important (go to CJane Run’s blog for those life lessons)  It was all as it should be, for me.  

Grateful for that broken red bowl.  



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November 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Someday, the kitchen will be remade into a newer, fresher version of itself. We’re so glad we hesitated…as the economy changed seemingly overnight.


But, you see, I’m practicing the Law of Attraction.  I’m working to make our dream come true.  

So until we’re ready, I’m focussing on the little things that brighten me – – that encourage me to create a little hearth here in the kitchen that we have.  Because it’s good enough.  

And I’m okay with that.  (Because I truly believe that our newer kitchen will come. In the due course of time.)




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November 1, 2008 By 1 Comment



In Lieu of Granite Countertops…and Custom Cabinetry…

New Kitchen Towels.  And Bowls.
Practicing Gratefulness.

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October 23, 2008 By 2 Comments

“Welcome, Rosie!”


I have to give a shout out to Rosie here, who is the first person to “follow” my blog!  I thought I was writing in anonymity but hey!  She saw my post about Nie Nie and wrote a lovely comment.  Having taken a look at Rosie’s creative blog I really must say, “thanks for the support, Rosie!”.  Now hers is a real blog.  I’m just getting started.

It was Stephanie, though, who inspired my post that moved Rosie.  Stephanie Nielson, who continues to dominate my thoughts and heart.  Stephanie Nielson, who, it appears, is gradually being roused from her deep, healing sleep.  Slowly they will bring Steph round…and I know the prayers for Stephanie will continue and be renewed once she’s aware and fully aware of what has happened to her.

I am so incredibly awed by how Stephanie, and by extension, her very cool and wonderful sister C Jane / Courtney (gosh, to start mentioning members of either the Clark and Nielson families could go on for paragraphs) has touched so many people around the world.  How being drawn in to this family, whether you’ve “known” Stephanie from her Nie Nie Dialogues or are just getting to “know” her now, through the love of so many bloggers, friends and family members, feels so personal. I mean, I’ve shown her posts to my kids – told them about the auction and latte bowls I’ll be getting – and how I want them to think of Stephanie when we start using the bowls here at home.  I’m not sure it’s possible for my children to have the visceral response to Stephanie et al. that I have…but I sure do want those bowls to mean something.  They will, to me, and I guess that’s enough.  They will serve as a reminder to strive for something more and to celebrate the everyday.  I’m no Stephanie and my blog is no Rosie…but in my own personal way, I want to be the best Jeannie I can.  Ya know what I mean?

Another thing is what I’ve been learning about the Latter Day Saints through my “relationship” with Stephanie and C Jane (and the sisters, and sisters-in-law) and Rosie here, who I also noticed is a Latter Day Saint.  Although I’m Catholic, I really enjoy getting to “know” people who live their Christian faith and are raising their kids in this modern and often immoral world.  I like to be amongst people who believe in our Lord Jesus Christ.  I’ve seen so many people receive true blessings within my internet community of friends…and have also interacted with people who don’t believe, who just don’t understand.  I am finding I prefer to “hang out” (albeit cyber-ly) with like-minded people.  Look at how Stephanie Nielson’s situation has effected soooo many people:  this is how God can work in a terrible situation.

I believe He is going to continue to take of her as she wakes up to face her new reality.  And I think Rosie believes it too.
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