notmovingpictures Episode 025: Vacation Talk

This episode is a bit, well, lengthy. Okay, to be honest it's a conversation mainly about my family vacation. Tommy and I talk about almost everything we did like the daytrips to NYC and Atlantic City, buying vinyl records and talking about trying new things musically. It does get a bit wordy and kind of drags for a bit. I loathe doing a lot of editing to notmovingpictures but believe it or not I did do some. Really I like to pretty much present things as they are, warts and all. With that you have episode 25, you might want to skip this one.

Opening Music: Alloy - Live To See The Day  
Closing Music: The Go-Go's - Vacation
Email: notmovingpictures@gmail.com Twitter: @notmovingpics
Blog: www.notmovingpictures.blogspot.com

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

A Day At The Beach

Contrary to published reports a great white shark did not beach itself in Atlantic City on August 6th. That was just me taking my shirt off to go swimming. Seriously, I don't tan so much as I burn. I'm a mutt who has German, British, Irish, Scottish and even a little bit of American Indian blood in his ancestry but it's the U.K. parts that come to the fore in my physical appearance. I'm pale, hairy and covered in freckles so you can understand why I tend to stay out of the sun. Getting sunburned is never a pleasant experience but on this occasion it was definitely worth it. Besides, the weather was quite nice and there was lots of cloud cover so it turned out to be rather minor which was a pleasant surprise.

Now I can say I get it. I understand the allure of the beach for those that live or grew up near one. Now I'm talking about a real beach here, not one like I've written about going to before with the family that was created at a lake near here. I'm talking about a proper beach at the ocean. My wife is one of those people, she is from Lima, Peru which has a lot of beaches close by. She's told me stories of walking thirty to forty minutes to get to the beach with her brother and cousins when she was young. I never really understood what would draw you to walk that far, to be in the heat, to get sunburned (okay they didn't get burned), to put up with crowds and bugs and everything else that goes with it. Until now that is.

While on vacation visiting my mother-in-law (amongst other relatives) we took a day trip to go to the beach in Atlantic City. I thought it would be nice for my wife since she hasn't been to a beach to swim since she came to the United States over eleven years ago. That's saying something since like I said, she grew up living very near the beach and used to go all the time, especially when she was young. My own experiences with, as I refer to it, a real beach, were confined to a vacation in North Carolina when I was about ten or eleven years old and one in Spain where I was on leave for a week while I was stationed in Germany in the U.S. Army. For the former I was an undersized, scrawny, easily sunburned (yeah I know I'm beating this point to death) and massively insecure kid and for the latter it was winter and the water was freezing cold so I didn't get to swim. In other words, my exposure to the beach was very limited at best.

We met up with a friend of my mother-in-laws who was in from Peru visiting her sons that live in Atlantic City and once together we set off for the beach. I thought I'd swim for about twenty to thirty minutes, get out and cover up while relaxing before getting back in the water for a bit with my shirt on and my bald head covered. That didn't happen. Instead, something wonderful occurred. As I said, the weather was great, lots of clouds, not a lot of the sun beating down on us. After I got in the water and waded out to chest level I really began to enjoy connecting with the water, determining whether to dive under individual waves or float over them. My son was learning to boogie board and he was having a blast. Later he started following my lead as I taught him everything I had just learned. My wife was also enjoying her time in the ocean water once again. We were getting used to the strong pull of the water as in came in and out, from different angles, over and over and over.

Basically I felt the connection to nature. As much joy as I saw on my son's face as the wave caught him on his board and propelled him forward I know it was showing just as much on my face as I went further out and stopped attempting to battle the waves and instead tried to move with them. Now I understood why people want to live so close to the beach, why they want to spend a lot of time there, why they enjoy learning to boogie board or surf. It's a natural thing to want to spend your time and do things there. Now I get it. The joy I felt was worth the fatigue that came from resisting the tide, it was worth getting bitten by flies, worth the fearful shame I had of people seeing my pale, overweight body without a t-shirt on and absolutely, positively worth the sunburn. Nor did I care that I smelled of the ocean when we went to go eat afterwards. None of that mattered because I felt my family and myself  bond with the sea.

If you think I'm being melodramatic for the sake of the story well, you are wrong. If you don't believe me I don't care, you weren't there. I was. I simply advise you to get yourself to a beach and find out for yourself. Make up your own mind with real life experience. With any luck you'll have a similar experience to mine, something to remember and share with your family. Now I want more, I just have to find a way to make it happen more frequently, something not easy in a landlocked state like Oklahoma. It's doable though, now that I get it.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Urinating In Paracas, Peru

 

I saw this sign in the bathroom of the right on the beach restaurant we went to in Paracas, Peru after we had taken a boat trip to the Isle de Ballestas. The thing that stood out to me was that if the owners or manager or whoever felt the need to put this sign up there was a reason and that reason could only be an ongoing problem with people urinating on the floor. I mean, you don't put up a sign like this in order to prevent something that isn't already occurring.

The food was great and the restaurant was nice so I can't think of too many reasons why they would have this kind of problem. Unless of course some patrons were consuming so many cervezas that they found themselves unable to aim accurately when it counted. Since it's a place where you get many tourists, both national and international, it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case.

At any rate I found the sign amusing enough that I took the picture, alright I took two pictures but this one was the best.  I won't comment on whether my aim was steady or not back in the days that I used to drink. I'll leave that to the imagination.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

The Summer Heat Burns My Soul

The other day I did something completely out of character for myself. I took off my shirt while outside. Now it was in my back yard, however I did stay topless as I pushed my lawnmower around to the front of the house and in the garage. What’s the big deal you say? People take their shirts off all the time so what’s my problem? To start let me paint you a picture of what I look like. I’m 6’1” tall and go about 240 pounds on my leaner days. I am light skinned (my Irish, Scottish and English bloodlines win out over everything else for me), have freckles and am hairy. Add to that a lifelong image issue with my body (Americans seems to have this problem more than others) and there you have my reluctance to be seen shirtless even if it’s in my own yard. At least my body issues aren’t as bad as Kevin Smith’s who suffers from a much larger (pun intended) problem than I do. Please note this isn’t a dig on Smith at all, I terribly admire what he has accomplished in life and he has inspired me to start my own creative endeavors at long last. He has stated before that he doesn’t like taking off his shirt at the doctor’s office or even in front of his wife. At least I'm not that bad.

Basically what has led to this change in behavior is that my wife wants us to take a vacation to the beach but the only time available between our schedules and before our son goes back to school is towards the end of July. The closest beach for us to do this is in Galveston, Tx, about a nine hour drive away. So given my natural pale state plopping me into Galveston in late July means I will literally be red, sunburned to a crisp, unless I slaver zinc oxide on and wear long sleeved shirts and pants with a floppy sun hat at all times. Of course that endangers me to overheating myself on the beach and constantly sweating throughout the day so neither of those appear to be ideal working situations. My only other option now seems for me to go into the yard doing whatever work I can without wearing a shirt for about 30 minutes a day. Currently in Tulsa we are having 100 Plus degrees of weather and so far this week each and every day has been an Ozone Alert Day so I have to be very careful that I don’t overdo it. Today I even went over to a friend’s house and sat shirtless while our kids were in the pool. Very abnormal behavior for me but I do seem to be going through some life changes all for the better in the last year.

Perhaps by the time our vacation starts I will have been so sufficiently exposed to the sun that I won’t have many issues as long as I’m smart about what I’m doing. My wife won’t have any troubles at all. She is from Lima, Peru and has darker skin than I do. Thankfully our son is a mix of the two of us and while he’s not very dark skinned he’s not pale like his dear old dad and the more he gets outside the more tanned he seems to get. Being from Lima, my wife grew up going to the beach all through the summer but hasn’t been to one since she visited Atlantic City in the fall of 2002 when she was a freshly arrived vacationer to these shores. She ended up staying in the country but moved to Tulsa the following year where we met. Ten years is long enough and although it will be stretch financially and given my natural aversion to the sun, I’m willing to do it for the sake of our family. A family vacation has been long overdue and besides, I could stand having another go at some crawfish or alligator. That's one of the other changes I’ve undergone in the past year or so, I’m trying and enjoying food that I never would have touched in the past. Let’s just hope I make it back from all of this in one piece without too much burning.
 
Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.

Next Time Just Kick Me And I'll Take The Clue

Saturday I did something that I haven't done in quite a few years, I washed my truck. If you want to get technical about it I washed my wife's car as well. Now don't take that the wrong way, it's not as if either vehicle has been neglected and were filthy eyesores. I have taken them to the car wash and done it there, although not very frequently. I'm referring to actually washing them by hand in our driveway which turned out to take more time than I initially thought it would. My wife's car was done fairly easily as it is a small four cylinder car (Dodge Caliber) however my big pickup (GMC extended cab) proved to be more difficult.

At one point I had a step ladder out so that I could reach every place on it. If felt good to be out in the sun sweating, doing something somewhat physical, I just wish my son had come outside so that I could have soaked him down, purely accidentally of course. Once I finished I came inside for some well deserved lunch before playing a few rounds of Super Mario Brothers with my son and then followed that with a quick shower. Saying my goodbyes I dashed off to work where I thankfully had been given six hours of overtime. Hey, we need the money, even more so since we are trying to take a trip to the beach. The closest one is in Galveston, Tx which is a mere nine hour drive from Tulsa. Hopefully gas prices won't go up too much.

Work consisted of QCing medical records (kind of a quality check if you will) and while doing so I started noticing that my hands were starting to cramp. As I sat in front of the computer I also started noticing that my shoulders were aching a bit too. Still, for some unknown reason I took nothing for the pain and instead chose to tough it out. I can't really explain why. Later I had to get some cover sheets and bent over to retrieve them and as I stood up while counting them I banged my head on one of the shelves. Not too hard but still enough that I immediately started feeling the effects of it.
At this point I gave in and took some ibuprofen. Apparently it takes getting hit in the head for me to decide that there's no sense in making things more difficult than they need to be.

I'm not sure if it was stubbornness or machismo or what but it took that many hints for me to get it. Maybe it's just part of being a man. We know that we can do something that will make us feel better and still we resist, insisting that we can "tough it out." Regardless, work was productive and the money will be well used and just in time. I just wish after returning home that my son hadn't backhanded me in the testicles while I was trying to brush his teeth. It was the capper on a tiring, achy, painful day, a capper that I could have done without.

Written and Published by Don Leach. May not be used without permission from the author.