Art in the sand

What better to do on a day on the beach than play in the sand?

Perhaps turning playing in the sand into art?

Here are some of my photographic memories of an annual Sand Sculpture Festival held on Mustang Island, off Corpus Christi, TX.

The festival lasts three days. the artists start on Friday, with their beach place, barrels of wet beach sand and a few tools. Bu Sunday noon all sculptures have to be finished, because then they are judged.

The pictures are from all three days of the 2005 festival and the top pictures are of the sculpture that won firt price that year .
Hope you'll enjoy this little trip to the beach art gallery. :-)

Wanderlust

Randi, whose Swedish blog is not only visual delight, but a veritable visual orgy (visit it, you'll be as enchanted as I am), asked me (in Swedish) in a comment to my previous post (Flying cats) why I change countries and continents every year and I decided to attempt to answer this question.

But first a disclaimer of sorts: I do not really change countries and continents every year: I might stay 18 months in one place, 7 in another or have a period of moving more often: 3 months here, 4 in another place or country... still, in my early retirement period it averages so far changing places about once a year.

Why? Because I like it - I like new and different, over and over and over again. I do not have to get tired of the place in which I am, to suddenly feel this strong pull to go somewhere else, experience something different.

Sometimes that pull to go somewhere else coincides with the change of the weather: I was, for example, enjoying living in Georgia mountains, enjoying the scenery, the forests, the lake, the mountains, as well as the proximity to Atlanta and its abundance of metropolitan opportunities: cultural, social, commercial.

But I was not looking forward to spending the winter there: it is usually too warm there for a nice, visually delightful cover of fluffy snow, but cold and gray/black for several months. So I started planning a move to a warmer locale - initially for about 4.5 months (mid November-mid March), but the plans changed and I decided to go to Puerto Rico and ... stay longer. The same reason took me from Sweden to Spain and from Spain to Morocco ( even southern Spain seemed too cold for me in winter), etc. etc.

More often it is because I miss something in a place, which I otherwise like. On Padre Island, in Texas, I enjoyed being a beach bum, enjoyed a company of really good, close and fun friends, proximity to Mexico, which I visited fairly often.....yet I missed forests, deep forests, I missed trees - other than palms and I missed mountains, even hills. So - after a year and a half - I took an opportunity and moved to NE Georgia, famous for its deep forests, to the shores of picturesque (though man made) mountain lake, Lanier.

There is hardly a place where you could have everything: every landscape, every climate... though, I admit, California near San Francisco, where I used to live for several years. comes pretty close: within - at most - half a day's drive you can go from a hot desert to the snowy Sierra, from rugged coast to sandy beaches... but California is overcrowded and very expensive... Besides, I have already lived there - more than 5 years - and there are so many other places where I haven't lived yet.

But why this wanderlust? I don't know. I guess it is a personality trait (or as astrologers would say, my being an archetypal Saggitarius ;-) , but certain circumstances might have deepened it.

First my childhood and early adulthood in Poland, under a communist regime, when a dream of traveling abroad, exploring other countries, exploring life in a different political system was for most people just a pipe dream, while for the others required serious sacrifices: leaving your child, family, friends behind, without knowing for how long, if not for ever.

I still remember a Polish song popular shortly before I emigrated (here translated):
" ah, to get on a train to anywhere,
not caring about baggage,

not caring about a ticket,
squeezing a few dollars in hand,
watching how everything remains behind".

A - partially involuntary - emigrant 's song. Of course this was an uncensored version of a song; in its official, censored version, - "a handful of dollars" ("pare zielonych" in Polish) was substituted by " a green stone", ("kamien zielony"), which did not fool anybody, but the censor ... or may be not even the censor, but playing dumb, he or she had an excuse to allow it to be broadcasted.

Imagine what it did to wanderlust.

And then my doctoral dissertation was censored, I got "an offer I could not refuse"... and stay in the country, yet I had to refuse it to be able to look at myself in the mirror, so I emigrated, illegally, of course, to Sweden.

(A distinction: I never was an "illegal immigrant". I was always legally in Sweden. But I was an
"illegal emigrant": I had no Polish security police's permission to stay abroad any longer than two, three weeks and to take with me anything more than a small backpack and $20)

After a year in Sweden I got married, after another year brought my daughter from Poland. We bought a house in the Stockholm's archipelago, then a vacation house at the shores of Lake Maelar, two cars, stuff.

With Swedish taxation even two incomes weren't enough to carry those expenses and allow for travel more often than every second year, for a couple of weeks... and I soon started to treat ownership of real estate as a tremendous psychological burden - as a new kind of prison.

This time not a communist ("you shall never be allowed to move anywhere") kind of prison, but a Swedish - very heavily taxed - middle class ("you must - like every proper Swede - own a house and a vacation house - no matter that it limits your mobility") prison.

A few more years and I managed to convince my Swedish hubby to move to the USA, where we could afford travel - financially, that is.... but in the USA the vacation time is so short, I ended up in the third, US-capitalistic ("you shall never have time to travel" ) type of prison.

When my spouse died (young: brain tumor) and my daughter went to college I decided to turn a tragedy into an opportunity and get myself out of any and all of those "prisons": work on assignments, longer or shorter, in different countries, on different continents. And I did - in almost 50 countries total!

And I really enjoyed it so much, I still continue that pattern in my early retirement.

"Perhaps", my daughter mused recently "when you really retire, we can buy you a house and you can stay in one place? Mostly?"

"Perhaps" I answer "when I get really old and decrepit".

"And when are you planning to get really old and decrepit?"

"Never, I hope".

"That's what I thought" - she sighs.

But, who knows, I might actually get that old and decrepit... and perhaps even enjoy it ;-)

Shark, kitties and the hurricane Rita

Two years ago I lived on the north end of Padre Island, an over hundred miles long, and mostly still undeveloped barrier island stretching from across the Corpus Christi Bay to the border with Mexico. It is a nice place, if you like wide, long stretches of sand, a decent surf, fishing and can live without forests, as the vegetation there is sparse. My apartment building was facing the dunes, the beach and the sea behind them. I have a cat, Rascal, a huge black and white "tuxedo":

Rascal loved the sunny dune- level balcony and frequently ate, drank and lounged there. Soon I noticed that a small, skinny cat was visiting him there and helping herself generously to his food, yogurt and his fresh, cold water. Rascal did no object, so I figured the visitor must have been a feline. She was very shy and ran away in panic as soon as she seen me coming, but I developed a habit of leaving her a generous helping of food on the balcony every evening.

A few weeks passed and I noticed that she started gaining weight and became less shy: now she would come also when I was sitting on the balcony, and a few times even ventured inside, helping herself to more of Rascal's food.

At the end of August I went on a couple of weeks long trip and asked my pet sitter to feed both Rascal and the stray, who now practically lived partially on the balcony and partially in the sand under it.

I came home one evening with a dengue-like symptoms, fever, headache, body ache, not really able to care that a hurricane Rita was approaching Texas coast - even though both Emilia and then Katrina taught us not to be too complacent about the possible danger. But I was too sick to care. I fed Rascal and the stray and collapsed onto my bed.

I woke up next morning still sick like a dog, barely able to open the balcony door for Rascal to go out, and just before I fell asleep again I heard that the evacuation of the entire north Padre Island was ordered by the city of Corpus Christi by 2 pm the next day, when the bridge to the fast land would be closed. Oh, good, I have 30 more hours, I thought while falling asleep again.

A couple of hours later I woke up to some strange noises coming from behind the iron-work headboard of my bed, which was placed in a corner of the bedroom, on the diagonal, to assure the best view from the bed. I lifted my very heavy and very achy head a little, looked through the iron lattice of my headboard.... and could hardly believe my eyes. There, in the triangle was the stray from the balcony and four tiny, apparently quite newborn kittens, still blind and barely crawling.

I looked through the window and saw that the sea had already swallawed the entire beach and the waves were already rising above the dunes. No wonder this cat mama sought shelter for herself and her offspring. But now I was responsible for evacuating not only myself and Rascal, but this new family addition, too. Oh my, oh, my.

I willed myself - it wasn't easy in my condition - to get up and prepare my car for the trip across the bridge. I managed to lug over some hard to replace documents and necessary supplies (mainly water and cat food) to the car... and fainted after the second or third trip.

No, I decided. That would not do. I need to get stronger to be able to drive myself and the cats off the island and to the safety of the Texas Hill Country where my friends still lived, since shelters refused to take pets and all the hotels in the 250 mile radius were already booked.

My daughter called and asked if I was about to evacuate and whether I've taken the family albums with me. OK, I promised not to leave the family albums behind and told her I would be evacuating tomorrow, just well before the bridge closed. I did not tell her I was sick and I did not tell her that I have now been appointed a guardian to a stray cat - which I named Shark, since she came from the sea (well, almost) and had very sharp little teeth - and her four off springs. Daughter was too far away to be able to help, so stressing her out would be pointless. I ate some consomme, took some pills, slept most of the afternoon and all evening, fed the cats, ate some more consomme and slept all night to the melody of Shark's and Rascal's content purring and tiny noises made by the kittens behind my bed. When I woke up the next morning, I was feeling better, the island was almost deserted, there was not a single bottle of water and not much gas left at the only still opened gas station, and the water level in the sea was as high as the day before. I ventured as far as to the bridge leading to the fast land and saw that the water level in the bay was also terrifyingly high, almost touching the bridge's driveway at lower levels.
But the sun was shining and the sky was as blue as it could be. It didn't look like an approaching hurricane at all. And then I heard an announcement that the hurricane Rita moved towards Texas-Louisiana border and the evacuation of Padre Island and Corpus Christi was called off, because we were no longer in danger.

And Shark's kitties could now grow and prosper in safety. cared for by both Shark and Rascal, who gladly - or at least patiently - assumed a role of a daddy .