And we are home

Coming home after a vacation inevitably yields mixed feelings.  It's great to be where you live, but it's also sad to end the time away.  I love my job, but I love even more the feeling of having no day-to-day responsibilities beyond organizing the pack of people in the house.  And so on.

One feeling that is in no way mixed, however, is the triumph we all feel at besting the Bobcake.  Yes, the believers were right, and we skeptics were wrong.  The 2012 Bobcake is no more.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version of it.

We consumed more than cake while at the beach, of course.  In addition to truly obscene quantities of calories, we also plowed through two dozen DVDs, as you can see below. 

If you can find a pattern--other than the fact that I own them--that unites all of these films, you're  probably also a believer in the conspiracy to hide the alien remains in Area 51.  Nonetheless, I'd like to hear your theory.

Tomorrow, I dig through the mountain of mail, pay overdue bills, and generally prepare myself for my re-immersion into the working world. 

Last night at the beach

I'll keep this short for that reason: It's late on the last night here, and I'm quite tired. The Bobcake is no more; a final photo will appear tomorrow, when my email provider is working again. We swam and ate and laughed and ate and laughed and rested and napped and ate and slept and laughed, and for two weeks I was mostly away from the world. I wish I could do it for two more months.

More tomorrow, after I'm home.

Of wind and cake

The winds blew hard today, hard enough to change the contours of the dunes that separate our house from the beach. A few of us went for a two-mile walk along the beach during the windiest part of the afternoon, and it was work. We had the wind at our backs for the first half, but we were trudging into it as the rising tide covered much of the available beach on the return. Spray and sand coated my sunglasses so the world was a gauzy, indistinct vision in front of me. Birds fought the winds and frequently failed, their bodies moving sideways as the air swept them along.

How nice it is to have such easy problems as a hard walk on a gorgeous day at the beach.

Our attack on Mt. Bobcake continues, and we are gaining ground. Opinions in the house are mixed as to whether we will eat all of it before we must depart Saturday morning, with one camp convinced it will be no problem, and the other skeptical at best.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

I am in the latter camp, but I am rooting for the former.

Only at the beach

do we see and do certain things.

For example, only at the beach would we ever consider buying this cake.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version of it.

Here, we not only considered the cake, we bought it and carried it home with us.

Perhaps it is because the ocean's majesty awakens in us an appreciation of power and art that we normally lack. Consider the cake's soulful left eye, with its single tear, the Mona Lisa-like complexity of the left side of its smile, or the mysterious lack of blue icing all around the bottom layer. Clearly, an artist was enticing us with his/her mysteries.

The beach is also the only place where I see chalkboard messages like this one.

Of course, I may simply hang out in all the wrong places.

On the continuing news front, the Bobcake remains standing, though in a decreasingly smaller form.

I don't think we'll finish it tomorrow, but with luck, we will conquer this beast of chocolate goodness before we return home.

A new dessert item joined the house today.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

Yes, Sarah baked for us a peanut-butter crab cookie with two baby crab friends.

Clearly, we needed more desserts.

Of course, the Bobcake is still fighting the good fight; we have not defeated it yet.

On the other hand, we are clearly gaining on it.

A new combatant, the latest in the beach house's long history of strange visitors, joined us in the battle tonight.

It's not the creepiest member of the creature menagerie we've had over the years, but the longer you stare at it, the more unsettling it is.

I suggest not looking for too long.

Think twice about product names

You don't have to spend much time in a beach town before certain lessons become clear. One of those hit me again today at a small local store: think twice before you try to be too clever with a product's name.

As always, click on a picture to see a larger version.

In news of the Bobcake, we continue to gain ground on it, though our efforts flagged a bit today.

For those who've noted that most of these short blog entries are about food, that's because I'm on vacation, the food stuff is easy, and, hey, I'm on vacation. I've actually been pondering whether to continue this blog, because its readership is relatively small and it does take time every day. That said, I'm keeping it going, at least for now, and I won't make any decisions on anything significant until well after my vacation.

For now, to bed.

Tiger blood, Bobcake, and bad movies

So we're driving down the road, returning from an afternoon of eating bad food and exploring a nearby beach community, when we pass the roadside, weekend-only market one of whose vendors sells shaved ice with the tiger blood flavor. Kyle ponders the sweet redness of tiger blood and finally decides that he must indeed have some. We pull a hard right, drive over some dirt, and out of the car he goes.

When he returns, he brings this.

As always, click on a picture to see a larger version.

As we continue the ride home, Kyle enjoys its sticky-sweet goodness.

He finishes it well before we reach the beach house. One of the costs of playing with tiger blood is what it does to his tongue.

Of course, it is a price Kyle pays gladly.

In other food developments, the Bobcake continues to stand strong despite our repeated attacks on it.

I am confident, though, that the end is now in sight for the giant monster of cakey deliciousness--assuming, of course, that we do not all first die of chocolate overdose.

Like Kyle, we weigh these potential costs and decide to risk them.