Week 4 - Sis

This week was slooooow and so I had plenty of time to read. Sunday was a football and Nook day which wasn't so bad afterall. Worked my way through part of the week catching up on what was left of magazine stack. The articles were very interesting but remembering what I read seems to be a problem. The newspaper article was sent to me by my sister Judy. Psst! Chickie to her family. This article was about a beach my family spent a lot of weekends at. Martin's Beach in Half Moon Bay, California which is the subject of a suit to keep the right (Coastal Act ) for public use. It was a place of a kids dream. You had the water for cooling off and surfing, the wet sand for castles, the picnic tables for eating whatever tastes better while inhaling the ocean's air. Since there were usually at least three families sharing our day that involved a lot of kids. My parents had seven and the average was four for the other families. This meant parents had a time watching and making sure the kids were safe when playing in the surf or helping kids who got sand in thier eyes....with little help from their siblings. ;-) During the smelt season (delicious little fish) my dad, uncles and sometimes friends would rent these nets that reminded me of hammocks with a pole on each end and head out into the water, maybe 3-4 feet deep. Turning the net on its side the men would wait for a wave that brought the fish in and then fling the fish on the beach for the kids to gather in buckets or pails. This was a great adventure for the kids, free labor for the dads and food for the price of a rental fee. Running in the sand burns a good amount of energy, that means parents had a quiet ride home while the kids slept in the backseat of those big old cars. In my family's case, it was more like kids piled on each other with some of us complaining that the sleepers were crowding us. Hoping the re-opening of Martin's allows families in the near future to start a tradition of their own. Remember the last post and us receiving the valuable salami? This was the remains and a snack last night. WAH! Beautiful weather yesterday and today, so the only outing of the week the dreaded grocery shopping. Lisa says she wants to throw a hissy fit when we have to shop; my mental hissy fit comes at the counter when it says, "You pay this amount"!