Long Time, No Blog. And Red Tide.

The hardest thing about starting to write my blog again after taking a three-month hiatus is coming to terms with the fact that so many noteworthy things have happened this summer that I will never write about. I used to tell myself that I would attempt the "catch-up" game of trying to scour my brain for the minute details of events long past, but I know what it would really be:

Picture.

We had swimming lessons. The girls liked it. Harris did not.

Picture.

Gwen went to tennis camp. She liked it.

Picture.

We went to church.

Picture. 

We went to church again.

And so on.

Let's not bore ourselves with that.

So here's what we are up to right now, in August 2021. We are in Florida again. We had a month-long trip here last year and had so much fun that we repeated it this year. We had a family reunion in Fort Walton for a week and are now in the second of four weeks in Sarasota.

Our view in Fort Walton:

Does it get any better than that?

I don't have any pictures of my extended family, but I promise they were there. I'm not making this reunion up!!!

And now we are in Sarasota.

The BUMMER of the trip is that we made sure to rent an AirBnb right next to our favorite beach, Siesta Key, but all of the close beaches in our vicinity, including Siesta Key, have terrible red tide right now.

What is red tide? Really big and bad algae blooms in the water that smell and kill fish and just make the beach rather unpleasant. Humans can safely swim in it, but it does tickle your throat and make you cough.

We heard varying reports from friends about what it was like to go to the beach in these conditions. "It's not that bad" some friends would say while others said they avoided it. 

We didn't have the chance to check it out right away. We hosted a few friends for a swim party, and then it rained for a couple of days. At first, I was glad to avoid checking it out, but with time my anxiety built toward the unknown. One gray afternoon, I decided to take the kids to walk down the beach and see how bad it really was.

Here are pictures from our lovely beach walk. Before we arrived, I tried to describe the conditions to the kids, but they just got excited. "Can we take a dead fish HOME!??!" Gwen asked on repeat.

Here is a dead puffer fish. Of course, June was excited to see a puffer up close, so there's that. 

Another little guy. These were all up and down the shore.

It was gross, but I was still in the denial phase (more on that below) so I came home and told Dan that we should try a beach day the following afternoon. Dan is a way easier person to please than I am, so I assumed that he would tell me that it was fine and that we could tough it out. He didn't. 

In fact, each family member's personality traits came out STRONG during that short afternoon at Siesta Key.

June--walked along the shore and mourned the loss of each and every fish she encountered. Could be heard to say things like "Look at the metallic color on that one. So sad she's dead now" and "what a waste of beautiful scales!!!" The worst was when she found a crab. That pushed her over the edge.

Gwen--so grossed out the whole time and could only talk about going home. Still made a friend though.

Harris--jumped around and worked on his fear of water that he doesn't really have but feels like he has the first 20 minutes of any swimming expedition.

Me--feeling responsible for this whole terrible predicament, I went into full-on Mom Mode (aka "Let's Make the Best of It" syndrome) and acted like it was all no big deal and that we could ignore the terrible smell, incessant coughing, numerous dead fish and have fun anyway.

Beck--Not going along with my "just ignore the problems" plan, he walked along the shore and pointed to every. single. dead. fish. And would not move on until I acknowledged the dead fish by saying "dead fish". Then he would repeat "dead fish" and then we would walk until the next dead fish, where I would say "yes, dead fish" and then he would say "dead fish" and so on and so forth. And then he stepped right on a dead fish. And then my life was over.

Dan--True to character, Dan gave it the ol' college try but also gave me his "sunk cost" speech, which he gives me on a monthly basis. For those of you who didn't study econ in college (or marry someone who did like I did), a sunk cost is unrecoverable and thus should have no bearing on your future decisions. In this case, the money we spent to get here is "sunk", meaning we aren't getting it back, so we don't have do gross activities just to make us feel like we got our money's worth. Cut your losses and move on.

So when even Happy the Clam Dan was giving up and moving on to his "sunk cost" speech, I knew that I was being nutty.

That's what made me realize that I have been going through some ridiculous 1st world problem version of the stages of grief over this silly red tide.

I have been in denial ("We'll tough it out! Other people are wimps, but we're Jolleys! We're used to gross things!") and have gone through major shame and depression ("I should have KNOWN red tide would hit!!! Why don't I pay attention?? We drove all of the way down here and spent so much money and for NOTHING"), to anger (When Dan gently suggested to me that we don't have to tough it out and can just find other things to do, I let him know of his betrayal) to finally acceptance. Now I know that we don't want to go there and have adjusted accordingly. We drove 90 minutes south to Sanibel Island yesterday and had a fantastic beach day.

The End.