As I finish up the tasks that hopefully will secure my spot in The Peace Corps, I find I also need to fully work out the process by which I will blog my experiences. While the process of simply writing seems to work well using the iOS Notes app, which let’s me post directly into WordPress, I am unsure about how photos will work. So, this installment will focus on formatting photos into my blog. Let’s hope it works.
I walk a lot. When I have something I need to think out I walk even more. When I am stressed, unsettled or deeply troubled I head to the beach and walk a lot there. Such was the case this morning. The beach I go to is Playalinda, near Kennedy Space Center and inside the Merrit Island Wildlife Preserve.
Please stifled your giggles, quiet your chuckles and purge your mind of the image of me cavorting, sans clothing, in the rising morning tide. For those of you who are unaware of the rumors concerning Playalinda, I shall elucidate. Rumor has it that Playalinda a beach for nudists. The bare truth is that the five or so miles of pristine beach is NOT home to naked sun worshippers, well, not four and a half miles of it anyway. If you do feel the need to be totally free you need to go to the last half mile of beach. There the park rangers turn a gratefully blind eye those who insist on sunbathing bare. On the rest of the beach you’ll find fisher folk, families, surfers, and other beachgoers all attired in normal beachwear.
Now, as I was saying: I had a lot on my mind this morning, and I hadn’t been to the beach in quite some time, so I set out to walk the sands and enjoy the morning sun.
Will I find bare sand and bare bodies, or just bare sand?
I usually park in Lot 1 and did so this morning (the naked folks hang out at lot 11 through 13). I choose this lot because of its closeness to NASA, about a mile south. There the public beach ends and NASA property begins and the walk to that border is usually a nice one.
Ahhhh! Nothing on the beach but surf and sand, or so I thought.
Making my way towards NASA proved harder than I hoped. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Man-o-Wars had washed ashore. I couldn’t walk in the waves like I normally do because these creatures were still being left on the beach with each wave and, as I understand it, the sting of the creatures are painful.
Interesting thing about Man-o-Wars, most people mistake them for jellyfish, but they are not. In fact, they are not one creature at all, but a symbiotic colony of animals, called siphonophores, that are so interdependent on each other that they seem as one.
That blue bladder is a gas bag topped with a sail, that’s how it moves about. The dark blue mass are the tentacles. Normally they just float about, catching breezes and eating small fish and making little man-o-wars.
Because there were so many of those darned man-o-wars I couldn’t enjoy my walk and had to cut it short. I’ll have to hit the beach again soon.
Hopefully the photos posted properly. If not I’ll have to keep working on the blogging process.
Well, I just found out the hoots won’t post to a blog directly from Notes. Bummer!
GoGeezer 