matching tracksuits

But our thoughts are still on the beach.

Our third day began without any alarm, with any reminder that we had to get up at any particular hour at all. Yesterday, we received a message from our Vrbo host "Hope all is well and enjoy your weekend!" to which I replied, "Everything is going great. We’re being very lazy, which was the whole idea." Since we got up yesterday for the sunrise, I guess that wasn't really all that accurate. Today, though, it was. No alarm. No commitments. So we weren't all out of bed until after nine.

After a breakfast of K's lovely pancakes, we went for walk on the beach, heading south toward the Daytona area for a change. Daytona Beach was in the news this morning for four separate shooting incidents over the weekend. Apparently, it's filled with college students partying for spring break, but here we are, just fifteen miles south, and there's no one around and not a hint of any kind of violence.

At least, not that type of violence. We watched a sea bird of some sort -- here my landlubber nature shows specularly -- catch a fish of some sort and fly about above us for a while. It seemed unable to decide what exactly to do, to land on the beach or to strafe the water's surface.

And just a bit further down the beach, a fisherman who'd caught a bonnet-head shark, itself quite the predator. It uses it's bonnet-shaped head to detect changes in electrical charge as it swims along the ocean floor. When it detects a change, it attacks that spot in the hopes of finding a blue crab or some mollusk or other.

All the while, more potential violence just off the shore: squadron after squadron of pelicans (that's what a group of them in flight is actually called -- what a perfect name) flew along the coast, not seemingly hunting (for they none ever dove), but also not seemingly uninterested in what was going on below them. Perhaps that's for the best: each time they dive, they do more damage to their vision until they eventually become completely blind. I suppose at that point, they starve. The cruelty of the natural world.

It gets me wondering how relatively violent we are as a species compared to other species. We like to think of life in the twenty-first as relatively calm, peaceful even, and it is for most of in the developed world. But the violence we do to each other in other parts of the world, and the violence we do to the Earth itself and most species, makes us unquestionably the most dangerous species on the planet. We are, after all, capable of all but destroying life on the whole planet in a a number of ways. Sure, we don't often end up violently devoured by some superior species, but we do more than enough violence to each other to make up for that.

But we can play cards.

"It's probably the most convenient time of year to catch a sunrise," K argued as she began her argument last night that we should get up early enough to watch the sunrise over the ocean. With it so close to daylight savings time switch, the sun rises at a very reasonable 7:30. It took surprisingly little convincing, so at 6:50, we were all up and heading to the beach.

We weren't the only ones. An older gentleman -- "older" probably meaning my age by now or just a touch older; I keep forgetting I'm in my fifties now -- was out setting up his fishing gear, and a few others were venturing out, coffee cups in head, to watch the sunrise.

I was hoping the large cloud mass on the horizon would make for a more beautiful sunrise than it actually did. Still, having the four of us there made it a memorable way to begin our first day here at Ormond Beach, which is only a 1.5-ish hour drive from UF, where L is studying.

After a half hour on the beach, we returned from a solid breakfast of bacon and eggs with biscuits before all decided that 9:00 am is a perfect time for a late-morning nap. We've all been sleep-deprived over the last few weeks, and since we had absolutely nothing planned for the day except some time on the beach, we all trundled back to our bed

In the afternoon, the kids took another nap (we did come here, after all, to relax) while K and I went on a walk.

We've come down to Florida to spend a couple of days on the beach with L. In some miracle of timing, all three of us connected to or involved in education have spring break the same week. So we arrived today and went straight to the beach after dinner.