Day 4

Before I can get into today, I need to go back to yesterday for a minute to say that Tim’s shirts, Dave’s shirt and my computer bag were not the only purchases yesterday. Josh also got a T-shirt, about which he complained mightily (it had a stupid saying on the front, the color was wrong) but eventually grudgingly accepted. He is wearing it today. I also need to back to Monday, when Dave taught Tim to chop the firewood. This daunting task has been Dave’s since we first started coming here, but Tim has now taken it over. The most daunting parts of it are the dullness of the axe and the chance of being attacked by the raccoon.

Now, back to this morning. Dave and I both slept poorly last night, probably because of the fabulous chocolate dessert. I started waking up every 15 minutes or so at about 5:30, and finally got up at 7. It was another beautiful day and the tide was out pretty far. There were already lots of people on the beach – apparently word got out that today was the very low tide. I did some bible reading, ate some breakfast, played a game of Sudoku and watched the clouds come in. Dave got up a while after and got ready to go try to find the Arch of Arch Cape for himself. After he left the clouds sort of started breaking up, and I got Tim up so he could have some breakfast before we headed out for the beach bikes.

I always forget that it’s only a short drive into town from here, compared to the 20 minutes it takes coming in from Nehalem at Thanksgiving. So we got to town very early, which was not a bad thing because midtown was completely parked up. Again, I blame the article in the Oregonian about the low tides. We circled around for several circles and eventually found a spot. The other thing I always forget is that even though they say they’ll open at 9:30, they don’t really mean it. Between the guy being late (and it was a different guy, too), his not knowing if he could take a traveler’s check from the other family that was there, and the general slowness of only having one person there, it was almost 10 by the time we got onto the beach. This was very disappointing to me, because low tide was actually at 8:40. A good thing that happened with the new guy is that he wasn’t as particular about getting the correct bike size, so he gave Tim and I the same size bikes, which meant that Tim’s bike was actually a little too small for him. This happy circumstance means that I have a whole nother year before I have the smallest bike.

While we’d been sitting on the bench in front of the bike place the sun had been shining on us, and I’d been starting to wonder if I’d made bad clothing choices. I had on a long-sleeved thermal shirt and zip front hooded sweatshirt, and I was hot. But as soon as we got on the beach and turned the cycles to the south, I started thinking I had erred in the other direction, because it was seriously windy and quite cool. We battled our way south. I was really struggling, even though you’d think with Curves and swimming I’d be in better shape. Tim wasn’t having any trouble, but the wind was just fierce. We made it to the rock with a hole in it, but by then the tide was pretty far in, so we didn’t stop. I’d climbed around in there on my walk on Monday, and Tim didn’t care about stopping. Just a little past Jockey Cap (that is, about 5 minutes later) I asked Tim how far he wanted to go – I wasn’t sure I would make it to the carriage road. He suggested that we split up, so he could go as fast as he could and maybe get to the house. I thought that was a great idea – that way he would stop laughing at my pitiful puffing and sweating. By the time he got to the carriage road, though, the tide was in too far.

He left his bike and went over the carriage road, but by the time I got there he’d come back. We turned around and headed back. Oh joy! Oh bliss! With the wind at our backs we were practically flying. Pretty soon all memory of the struggle to get there had faded, and I was starting to wonder why I hadn’t gone further. We zoomed up the beach, chasing seagulls and being the envy of all the kids on the beach. We stopped at Haystack Rock to take pictures and call Dave to tell him it was time for him and Josh to head for the Pig’n. I gave Tim my camera so he could take a picture of me in front of Haystack Rock, as is traditional. He decided to also take a movie of my while he was riding in circles around me. I got queasy just watching. He said it would teach me not to make him take pictures.

We returned the bikes and started walking towards the Pig’n. We got about halfway there when Dave and Josh pulled up next to us to give us a ride the rest of the way, which was good because I, at least, was tired. When we got there the parking lot had lots of open spaces, which was weird for two reasons – first, the only time I’ve ever seen more than one open space there is when it is closed, and second, when we got in the restaurant was pretty much full. But we weren’t going to look a gift space in the mouth. The food was the usual yummy Pig’n food, but there was one sad part. For years, Tim and I have been sharing one adult and one child portion of pigs in blankets (3 pigs and 1 pig, respectively) which gave us each 2 pigs which is perfect for me. Tim is now too big and hungry to do that anymore, so I had to order the adult version by myself, which is a pig too far.

After lunch Tim went to EVOO to see if they had bread left (the bread wasn’t out yet). Then he and Josh walked back to the van and headed home. Dave and I went to the mariner market for cheese and milk, then stopped at Waves of Grain in Tolovana for bread. Unfortunately they are closed on Wednesdays. So we headed on home and called EVOO to reserve a loaf of Bob’s Daily Bread, and also to call the Bistro to make reservations for 4 at 6:30 on Friday, and the Pig’n to see if I had left my sunglasses there (I had). By this time the rain, which had started as a drizzle at the mariner market, was coming down pretty good.

While we were at Pig’n I had licked my lips and discovered just how much I’d been sweating, so I took a shower and started the first load of coastal laundry. I wrested the computer out of Josh’s facebook-chatting fingers and worked on this blog for a while. Meanwhile Dave took his afternoon nap. I also read for a while and had a very short nap also, after moving one load out of the washer and another load in. I had thought it was earlier than it turned out to be, so I jumped in the car and headed to town, needing to be at Pig’n before they closed at three. I got there a little after, but they were still waiting for the last customers to leave. When I walked in the young woman behind the counter looked at me and said, “sunglasses?” I nodded, but then saw that those weren’t my sunglasses at all. So there was a sunglass mystery.

I headed across the street to EVOO to get the bread, and noticed that the streets were pretty much deserted. So I sent Dave a text to tell him I’d be in town for a while, and drove down the street. There were lots and lots of parking spaces on the street, and hardly anybody on the sidewalks – really nice. Also, the rain had stopped. So I parked in front of Bruce’s candy and went in a got some clandestine licorice wheels. Tim loves them and is not supposed to have them because of his braces, so I have been abstaining myself. But Tim hadn’t wanted to come into town, so I was able to indulge. I walked around town for about an hour, mostly looking for puzzles. They used to have quite some puzzles here, but they have all disappeared. Josh and I like doing puzzles, and I thought it would be a fun way to pass the time while it rained. But I just couldn’t find any that were less than 1000 pieces and not dopey. Next year we should bring the balloon race puzzle.

I got home and read for a few minutes (completely forgetting about the laundry), and then it was time to make dinner. Yes, it was one of our traditional eating-in nights: fruit salad, bread, and cheese. Although I have a watermelon, I left it out, because I’ve made the last two fruit salads without and everyone but me likes it better that way. This was a particularly fine fruit salad, highlighted by white nectarines, really ripe peaches, and a liberal amount of Ferrari-Carrano Eldorado gold sweet wine. I was a little concerned that Tim might be able to taste the alcohol in the wine – it’s less sweet than last year’s Adelsheim Glace - but he seemed to think it was just fine. We also shared a bottle of sparkling muscat, which was perfect and, I thought, picked up the flavor of the white nectarines. Before I started making the fruit salad I put the three cherries that were left in the colander for Gull Dukat. Two were fine, but one was about half rotten. We were surprised to see that the gull spat out the bad one. It seemed like they didn’t taste them, just gulped them whole, but apparently not. Who knew?

At dinner Josh brought up the old tradition of Sumo, which we used to play on the beach all the time. You draw a big circle in the sand and then two people get in and try to push each other out of the circle. One of my favorite memories is of Luke Miller, Josh’s 5th and 6th grade teacher, winning his matches with the boys by just picking them up and dropping them outside. We haven’t played for a few years, and I am probably not going to be able to play anymore since the boys are so huge, but next time we’re all down on the beach there needs to be some Sumo for sure.

You may be noticing a recurring theme of gigantic boys here. I think it’s because at home we don’t walk around together very much, but here we get out of the car and head in to a restaurant or a shop or something, and all I’m seeing are the backs of their heads. When Dave picked us up on the way to the Pig’n, I ended up sitting behind him because my legs are the shortest. I knew it would happen eventually, but Tim has grown so much since March that I was really not prepared for it.

Dave has started the fire with Tim’s wood, and Tim is out here texting and looking at a book about fish. I think it’s time to put down the blog and do some interacting. Also, for those of you who miss the food travelogue side of things, check out Dave’s blog: http://dave-foodandwine.blogspot.com/

Interaction Addendum: first Tim and I played canoe, a game of strategy and lots of counting squares. Tim and Dave really like it, but it is not my kind of game. Too much waiting and too much thinking. I think I would have won, but I got too irritated and gave up. Josh joined us at this point, because he was able to sit by the wall and have the laptop in his lap to stay in touch with his people. We played two games of Yahtzee, in which Tim got a yahtzee but didn’t use it as a yahtzee, and Josh got a yahtzee, and Dave got a yahtzee, and I did not get a yahtzee because I never do. Tim won the first game and I won the second. Dave didn’t win any, even though he was using the yahtzee application on his iPhone, which makes a noise like the Chairman from Iron Chef America moving his head when you shake it. And in case you are not impressed enough with the fact that there is a yahtzee application for the iPhone, you should also know that the dice are not determined by a random number generator, there is a physics engine in it that calculates how they would really go based on how you shake the phone. Really. It turned out to be handy that Dave, who went between Josh and me, could take his turn while Josh was deep in contemplation of what, exactly, he was going to do with the dice he ended up with. Tim got about 400 text messages while we were playing.

Then it was time to play “I’m going to Bubby’s House” with everybody but Josh. Altimeter, barometer, Cessna, digits, Elmo, flight plan, goose grease, helicopter, ice cream, Jehosophat, Klondike bar, llama, maintenance crew, nunchuks, Otis, P, the letter P, and Quill Pen. At Quill pen Tim got a phone call from an unknown person at 10:30 at night and had to leave, so once again we got stopped at Q.