Like the picture? I discovered today that flying a kite with one hand is no easy feat.  Nearly every time I picked up my camera I grounded the kite. I have another picture I've entitled "Baby did a bad bad thing to string."  The string got so tangled I eventually had to break it off and start over.  Still, I got the kite in the air long enough for several pictures, and didn't manage to land it on anyone, so I call it good.

The beach in question is Plum Island. It's a place that my family has gone to all my life, and when I was younger, I'd say it was my favorite place on earth. (These days I don't have a favorite place. Is that sad? It seems as though it should be, but I'm not sad.) Some of my first memories are associated with the beach, and it's the reason that my brother is leery of the water to this day - when he was about 1 and 1/2 he got knocked down twice by waves and took years before he'd go into the water again without being heavily coaxed.

I found five sand dollars today. I had a whole collection of them when I was in middle and high school, but I guess it's long gone. They are the fragilest things... I have little interest in the rest of the seashells that littered the beach - you have to get sand dollars out of the water, by the way - but I did collect a few smooth stones. I've been trying to find a worry stone, but haven't had any luck in stores, so maybe one of these will serve.

The water was unusually warm, given it's the Atlantic and all. I hadn't really planned to go swimming, but did. I wish it was always that warm, if it was I'd go to the beach more often!

There were of course bad things about the beach too - it's greenhead fly season, and it hurts like hell when those things bite you. Only one bite has swollen up and itched yet, though, so maybe the rest won't. And, despite being very careful to use sunscreen, I'm sunburned. Most badly on my right arm and my feet. The weird thing is that from the stripes of unburned flesh on my feet, I got the burns while wearing my sandles. I was barefoot the entire time we were there except for the walks to and from the beach on the wooden, 1/2 mile, boardwalk. My feet feel much worse than my arm.

All in all, it was a fairly nice trip to the beach. I've got a bunch of pictures, and some of them aren't too bad.