Emma and I are home safely and soundly from the beach. We had a wonderfully relaxing few days and I’m feeling all charged up for the next surge at work. At least, for the next week. Okay, Monday. I’m ready for Monday. Morning.

We went over on Friday, late afternoon, and spent the evening bumming around the beach house. We got to watch some Deep Cable for a while and I stayed up and watched most of the UF basketball game. Go Gators!

Saturday we went into St. Augustine for much of the day. We had an Irish breakfast at a little pub which was cleverly open on St. Patrick’s Day morning, serving food. We wandered around town for the rest of the morning, doing some shopping and having a pretty good time. It was cold, though, cold and windy. It poured down rain on Friday night and the temperature dropped something like 20 or 30 degrees between Friday and Saturday. Genius here didn’t plan well, so he was stuck wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt in the 60-degree and blustery weather. Oh well, I survived. We bought some gifts for friends (and for ourselves), including my groovy hat (visible in the picture below) and a cool art print of an old Guinness ad. We had lunch at the Columbia (always a favorite), where the picture below was taken:

Emma and me at the Colombia, St. Augustine, FL

After our late lunch, we meandered our way back to the car and went back to the house for a brief nap. The beach was fairly empty that afternoon, which was both surprising and not surprising. Schrodinger’s beach, I guess. It was spring break, so I thought there would be people there enjoying the last weekend of vacation, but it was cold, so I can understand the Florida boys (like me) not wanting to brace the weather for too long.

St. Augustine Beach

Emma woke up super-early Sunday morning and took the tripod and her camera down to the beach. I slept for a while longer but managed to join her in time for the sunrise. It would have been nicer if there were a few more clouds to catch the colors, but I really like how the picture below came out.

DSCN0421

We watched the UF basketball game this afternoon (Go Gators!) and then got suckered in to VH1’s Top Songs of the 80’s for a few hours. This is why we can’t have cable. Finally, reluctantly, we came back to town late this afternoon, arriving back in time for the Simpsons which was okay. Not great, but amusing in parts.

Enough for now. I’ll write tomorrow about my committee meeting (summary: it went well). Cheers!