The Essential Beachcomber

It's the dimming of the day. Work is done. Dinner has been consumed. This is the alternative to Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy on Manasota Key. The cameras come out.  No good  Florida vacation photo album is complete without a token sunset picture. Sunset watchers assume the position. The cares of the day fade away with the sun slowly sinking to the west. There are always those who can multi-task.   A big shell pile is hard to resist even in the glowing light of the fading sun. Sunsets are meant to be shared. If you missed the sunset today - good news!  There is another one scheduled for tomorrow evening .

(Credit: www.forthoseabouttoshop.ca) One of the side benefits of blogging are the actual bloggers themselves.  The Blogsphere is a huge global cyber-community.  Due to the content one's blog you tend to draw & be drawn to others with similar interests and ideas.  Nothing wrong with that.  Over time,  after exchanging comments & emails a personality & heart starts to emerge from the online nom de plume.   You meet the DH & find all about the DD/DS.  We brag about  grand kids and post about birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries.  We watch each others creative juices flow (or not) as we post our hand-made creations and various art. We take each other on our vacations and other wanderings. Every so often we actually get to meet face-to-face. I've never met a blogger I didn't like & I've  met a bunch.                             ...

Artist Mary Stewart's Fruit Ladies I got a massive giggle out of the article below.  The author is anonymous but I feel I could have written it because it sums up my feelings about looking for a new swim suit perfectly. Buying Swimwear I have just been through the annual pilgrimage of torture and humiliation known as buying a bathing costume. When I was a child in the 1950s the bathing costume for a woman with a mature figure was designed for a woman with a mature figure: boned, trussed and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered. They were built to hold back and uplift and they did a darn good job. Today's stretch fabrics are designed for the pre-pubescent girl with a figure chipped from marble. The mature woman has a choice. She can either front up at the maternity department and try on a floral costume with a skirt, coming away looking like a hippopotamus that escaped from Disney's Fantasia, or she can wander around every run of the mill department store trying...

As a beach comber, I have developed a pretty good eye for shells.  Even off the beach I can spot them a mile away.  While looking at a home for sale with a friend I caught the color of something beachy through a severely overgrown avocado tree that screened of the neighbor's yard.  As I stuck my head through to the other side to take a closer look I was greeted with a friendly "Hey there".  (So much for privacy on your carport) Sitting outside enjoying an afternoon beverage were a husband & wife snowbird couple who live in Englewood six months of the year and Canada the other six months.  They are heading back home after Easter.   The fruit of their daily beach walk labors was displayed on every table surface of their carport.  They kindly let me examine their shelling treasures more closely.  After chit chatting for a few minutes the lady runs inside to get a pretty shell that she couldn't identify.  Yup, I saw this one coming.  S...

The Marco Island Shell Club  held it's annual Shell Show on March  8 - 10 on Marco Island, Florida. I am a super resourceful person.  Whenever  possible I like to kill two birds with one stone.  I try to save gas by combining shopping trips instead of going to the store for just one item on sale.  If I find a shirt or pair of pants  that actually fit well & in a color I like I will buy several and stash them for later use.  So you can imagine my ingenious sensibilities going on overdrive when I figured out I could combine a shelling trip to Marco Island with the Marco Island Shell fair.  I had passed on the 75th Annual Sanibel Shell Show a few weeks back.  The Sanibel Stoop Guinness World Book of Records had been enough shellabrating for me.  I also wanted to check out a new shell show that I had never been to before.  Marco Island is a 2 hour drive south from my home base camp.  The public beach access on M...

Stump Pass is located on the most southern end of Manasota Key. The reason for calling it "Stump " Pass just eludes me. The birds seem to like all the available perches. The name choice just befuddles me. There are lots of creative folks walking the beaches.  Some people see driftwood - others see a beach hideaway. Andre & Ray from DC planted one stick into the beach the day before & came back to find an entire sculpture has grown out of their small beginnings.  They decided to keep coming back to check on the progress. Add a few pillows - maybe a nice seating arrangement. What's in a name?  That which we call Stump Pass by any other name would still be one of my favorite places to be.