Buried in the sand, Pt. II

I'm finally getting back to this blog after an amazing camping trip out west in Oregon, where we proudly swam in 5 different bodies of unpleasantly cold water: Lake Waldo, Crater Lake, Diamond Lake, some tiny stream near Vancouver, WA, and the Pacific Ocean. Technically I also waded through the small river at Smith Rock, but I won't count that here after our group's decision that being "in the water" necessitates that you hair and your junk (or equivalent) get soaked. Ha.

Luckily I also had the opportunity to fulfill the topic of my final post prior to vacation: being buried in the sand. I hadn't done this myself probably since I was little (if ever? I'm actually not sure...), but as we laid on the mini beach along the shores of Lake Waldo last week, the water a bit too cold to wade around in for more than half an hour, there was nothing else I could think of doing. So I began digging a hole on my own, and after about 45 minutes I jumped in and had my friends pile the sand back on top of me. Here's the magical end result:


Many thanks to my friends, old and new, for helping to make a wig for me out of the strange hair-like moss that blankets the trunks of the local trees and for artfully decorating my mermaid bottom half with intricate scales. Ah, and for the lovely bikini top as well.

I'm sure this is one of those photos that I should never post online lest I run for public office one day ha. But it's awesome, so I'll do it anyways :)

August vacation

Well I've been off from posting for a couple weeks, and now I am frantically preparing to leave for the Pacific Northwest for 10 days of camping/roadtripping/randomness with a couple of friends. Should be awesome. I'll finally restart my posts when I am back the week of the 24th :)

The more sand, the better

As I was writing the post last week, I realized that I touched on another awesome kid thing to do: be buried in the sand. Being buried in the sand rocks, as does burying friends in the sand and then doing unpleasant (note: euphemism) things to their face.

I can't find the photos from my experience with friends a few years ago in Hawaii. But needless to say, the fun involved a failed attempt to use towels to shield the events unfolding within from nearby beach-going families, resulting in innumerable wives covering their eyes in horror and innumerable husbands/sons falling over in uncontrollable laughter.

As a side note, I have no idea who the kid in this photo is, I just found it on a random google image search for "buried in sand" and "awesome". But I'd say he embodies pretty well the overall sentiment of this post and this blog; clearly no one in the world was having more fun at that moment than him.

One grain at a time.. sort of

Last Friday I ventured for the first time over to Revere Beach, the lone T-accessible beach in the Boston area, with a few friends to check out the annual New England Sand Sculpting Festival. There were 8 "professional" sand sculptors from around the country there, each given 48 hours to complete a sand creation from which one would be selected as the winner.

As you can see, these sand castles were pretty amazing, and also included subjects such as a tree full of bananas, broken glass in mid air, a fist with a single extended finger doing something deep and philosophical, and some other stuff that hadn't yet materialized into meaningful objects/ideas by the time I had arrived. There also was a single larger "demonstration" display of a winter cottage amongst trees in the woods that, according to the workers, had been created over the course of a week or so by a small army of sculptors and was not a part of the competition.

Sand castles are pretty cool. I suppose in this case adults were in fact the ones partaking in the fun, but of course it's almost always the little kids out on the beach building things and watching it all wash away in fickle frustration as the tide rolls in. It's not often that you see an adult walking out of the beach shop, neon green plastic pale and shovel in hand.

Not that I am claiming the alternative--laying quietly on the beach listening to the crashing waves--is a consolation prize to cry about. But it wouldn't hurt to see a few more sand castles out there just to prove that imagination doesn't whither away beyond age 12. If nothing else, though, at least entertain the folks around you and let yourself be buried next to one.

Bam!

Okay, I am being kind of lazy, but I want to get up a post. This past week didn't offer anything specifically amazing to talk about, unfortunately. So I figure I'd reach into the bag of past awesome kid things and pull out one of the namesakes of this blog: bumper cars.

Bumper cars are awesome. Period. I love them and I wish they were always around. At my age (and height) I can typically barely fit into one, and I also typically get mild whiplash when slamming head on into someone else. But wow is it fun.

This photo is of two of my friends in a bumper car with a big rainbow "Peace" flag attached at a month-long outdoor carnival in the Plainpalais neighborhood of Geneva, Switzerland in December 2007. I'll assume this is like one of those snapshot photos you see in bad scary movies that is taken immediately prior to something terrible happening. And as you can tell from the look of mischievous terror on the face of the driver (I'll keep friends anonymous here :), this is clearly one millisecond prior to a horrifically awesome bumper car collision.

If only all cars came equipped with bumpers. Life would be infinitely better. And our necks would all be a little stronger.

Fireworks!

So this one was easy following the 4th of July weekend. Who doesn't love fireworks? (I assume those who are simultaneously deaf and blind are not reading this blog) Certainly kids do, although for once this is a subject that is acceptable for adults to enjoy, too. That said, though, laws inhibit our ability to shoot off fireworks of varying degrees from state to state:
So up here in Massachusetts, no fireworks are allowed apparently, although that certainly didn't prevent people from firing them off this past weekend for the 4th of July. Bonus points to Pennsylvania for bucking the anti-fireworks trend in the region and allowing "essentially all consumer fireworks".

And as a fun side note, if you want to blow up fireworks its clear that you should move to Arkansas, which is the only completely "freedom-locked" state (if you will) in the union.

Let's do it in the middle of the street

I seem to have had a nice weekly activity over the past few weeks that fits perfectly into the spirit of this blog. This past Friday night Cambridge's local government did all the work in closing off a block of Massachusetts Avenue (the main thoroughfare through town) in front of City Hall right near my 'hood in Central Square and setting up a big outdoor dance party. For four hours (alas, I was only there for the final 90 minutes) around 1000 people filled the street and danced to blaring music beneath massive colorful lights being shined down from the roofs of nearby buildings.



That alone screams "awesome," but it was made that much better with a one-hour tribute block of songs to the late Michael Jackson.

On top of all of this, they lit up the City Hall building with all sorts of colorful, semi-psychedelic light displays; the spirals on the sides and the saxophone up top were spinning throughout the night.


Semi-spontaneous dance parties in the street = Very cool.