|
| Author: |
|
Doc Searls |
|
|
| Posted: |
7/15/2001; 3:08:57 AM |
| Topic: |
|
| Msg #: |
860 (top msg in thread) |
| Prev/Next: |
859/861 |
| Reads: |
3327 |
Coasting 
| | I'm sitting here after everybody's asleep, typing into the laptop on the kitchen counter of a beach house we're renting from these people. It's one of the older places on this list. Okay, it's not New England (nor Santa Barbara), but it's where the North Carolina branch of the family has been coming for several generations, and we're having a great time. |
| | Jeffrey slept well on both planes yesterday, and we got into Raleigh without much hassle. After going to my sister's new place (Mom's old place) to help her move furniture around, we went over to visit Mom at her place, where she told Jeffrey a bunch of Jeffrey Peffrey stories. These are inventive, improvised and well told existential meditations on chance meetings between a little boy and talking animals and imaginary creatures. Jeffrey has listened endlessly to tapes of Grandma telling these stories. So, after sitting still for waaay too many hours on airplanes and in cars, he was too full of energy to listen with any patience. But he was determined to hear her anyway, so he he sat at her feet listening with all the kinetic rapture of a mosh pit. I was just amazed that Mom, at 88, can still perform. I sat there with my jaw on the floor. She's really great at this stuff. |
| | Afterwards we got lost in the woods trying to find our way back to the Interstate. Then we finally crashed at the rather run-down local Comfort Inn. I had hoped to jack into the Net there, but this proved to be one of the few motels that still uses an old PBX with no phone jacks and no way to bypass the room phone. I realized at that point that if anybody did anything with a laptop in a hotel like this, it probably didn't involve a computer. |
| | Anyway, I was utterly wasted. So I crashed while Jeffrey watched a DVD on the laptop (I don't know when he came to bed, actually). Just a few hours later we got up, picked up Grandma, and drove to The Beach. It took six hours. We must have had 8 pit stops (4 each for Mom and Jeffrey). |
| | But we got here, unpacked and headed up to my cousin Charles' place up the beach where there were no less than four second cousins for Jeffrey to hang out with, plus The Beach itself. The water was 82 degrees — just perfect. And Jeffrey loved it. He's a water weasel anyway; but he completely freaked over so much soft, warm surf crashing gently over a wide sand bar. |
| | There was also plenty of beer and company, including all five Crissman brothers (whose dad I eulogized last year here) their wives and youngest kids. And unlike other years we've done this in July, the weather was perfect. In other words, not brutally hot. We cooked up some great shrimp creole (caught today by boats we watched, right off shore) for dinner, ate on the deck and had a great time. |
| | I'm sure all kinds of stuff is happening in the rest of the world. Maybe I'll find out more when I read my 95 emails in the morning. |
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
