Why is this gull laughing?

The photo above is of the type of bird that was stalking my father during our vacation. It's called a laughing gull, and though I learned about them at the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, I never did find out what they laugh about. And yes that is indeed blood on his beak....

Gulls don't just bother tourists for french fries and dig in the trash. They're not real friendly birds. So notwithstanding memories of movies like Hitchcock's The Birds, to say nothing about literature like The Raven, it could be a little intimadating to be stalked by one...especially over a period of several days. To give Dad credit, he says he knows that somebody who had the house before was probably feeding it....but he did spend a lot less time on the porch toward the end of the vacation!

So. After we got soaked on the nature walk at the Institute, we went into the town of Cape May to look around in some of the antique shops at stuff we couldn't afford. But that's not the fault of the antique shops - it's our fault we're broke. Like I said, if not for the generosity of our family, we wouldn't have been there to begin with.
And besides, I did buy a rose print post card for $2.00 which The Hub can frame for me.

On Wednesday evening we went to Atlantic city, where I tried my luck at roulette. Now, I know better than to gamble, but I did anyway. And, of course, I lost. But, after all, it isn't as if I bet the house. Between The Hub and I we only lost $30.00 and we were "entertained" for several hours. Atlantic City is just too weird for me, though, I've decided. It's not so much the desperately poor areas surrounding the wildly overdone casinos as it is the casinos themselves. They create a strange kind of disconnect from reality.

When you go there, you're aware of it. You know that everything about the place from the lighting to the lack of clocks is geared toward making a person want to linger, to play just one more round or try one more quarter in one more slot machine. You know you're being played. Now the slot machines don't even take coins any more, at least many of them don't. You put a bill in - the lowest one many of them take is a $5.00 and it shows on the screen how many "credits" you have. If you are playing a .25 cent slot machine and you put $5.00 in it tells you that you have "20 credits"...and, if you aren't very careful, you can forget that each one of those "credits" is real money that you have worked very hard to earn. When you press the "cash out" option a little piece of paper spits out that tells you how much money you have left. I actually did better at slot machines than I did at roullette ( but for some reason, I was playing numbers at roullette, which I knew I ought not to be doing....this is what I mean. If I'm having these kinds of lapses of judgement, imagine how someone less savvy might fare) And, you know that I have a very good sense of direction - except for when I try to find Donna and Geren anywhere, and The Hub and I got totally lost in Ballys and it took forever to find our way back to the place where we'd parked our car. It was like being pixelated!

One good thing about the casinos is they are inside. Safe from the gulls. Though I'll tell you another weird thing about Atlantic City. At night, the seagulls all seem to be flying over the tops of the big casinos and from below the light reflects off their wings and they look like little bits of confetti or something. We had the feeling that moneied interests such as Donald Trump had somehow managed to get control over even the seagulls. It was sad.

And, because I had been stubborn and had not wanted to drag my cane with me to Atlantic City, and we must have walked for miles on the boardwalk the next day I could hardly walk at all. So I spent almost the whole day resting in bed, sketching the sea shells that my niece and nephew had found, working on my story and watching television.

The night it was my turn to cook I made chili which seemed to be well recieved, though my nephew didn't like it, and his Aunt M. had to make him a PBJ sandwhich. I was really glad that I didn't have to use the oven for my meal. When it was M & D's turn to cook they turned the broiler on. I don't think that oven had been cleaned in awhile, and so, through no real fault of theirs, they set off the smoke alarm, which The Hub promptly disconnected. That might have been a mistake because then there was a little tiny fire in the oven, which they, being sensible people, just put out with out very much fuss. Still, if I ever have the good fortune to cook at that beach house again I hope I remember not to use the oven.

We heard a fire alarm going off again in the kitchen of a restaurant where we had lunch the day we went to Leamings Run Garden. The Hub was in a sort of fit of romance that day. He remembered that the very first trip we ever took together as a couple was 10 years ago when we came up to Cape May, and we visited the gardens then. He took a lot of photographs there, one of which has been hanging up in the dining room of our various houses ever since we've been married. Also, someone took our picture with a cute little bridge behind us and the flower gardens around. So he was anxious to go back there and try to recreate what he remembered as a very romantic day.

I don't remember it as being a particularly romantic day. I remember mostly that he complained about how hot it was and we got button holed by a very nice, but still extremely hard to shake, old local man who told us, in detail, the whole history of tomato farming on the Jersey shore. And then we went out to lunch in Stone Harbor at some venerable old institution and I tried a soft shell crab sandwhich, which I had never had before. It looked like a spider hanging out of two pieces of buttered bread. But, notwithstanding it's appearance, I didn't much care for the taste and so ate very little of it, which was probably okay since I was almost having heat stroke anyway.

So, on this trip, we went to Leamings Run again, and it was kind of romantic, because we sat on little benches in the various gardens and watched for the humming birds who were mostly intent on chasing other humming birds out of their territory. We also saw an exhibition of fancy poultry and we saw ( met?) a rooster from Poland whose feathers grew so far over his eyes it's a wonder he could see. You'd be amazed at the differences between various different kinds of roosters - not only can they have wildly different appearances but much different personalities. One, for instance, just kept crowing at the top of his lungs while another one just stood there and looked at him, as if he was thinking, "What's the matter with that guy, anyway?". And the hens were all in a seperate area, which means I don't suppose the garden was very romantic for them.

I got a couple visiting from Germany to take our photograph with the bridge behind us. I reflected that we were going to look a whole lot heavier in this photo as compared to the first one. And, don't you know, as we were leaving the SAME OLD GUY came up, and so I didn't make eye contact with him....and as we passed I could hear bits of the history of tomato farming being enthusiastically related to the German guy and his girlfriend. But maybe it's lucky. Maybe he's really an angel and what sounds like tomato talk is really a blessing that keeps people together for a long time.

Then we went to a restaurant which The Hub says is the same one we went to 10 years ago and encountered the soft shell crab. I didn't think it was, but I didn't want to argue with him, and besides that, it was air conditioned. The only trouble was that the place was already short of help and just after we put our order in we heard the unmistakable sound of the smoke detector going off in the kitchen. There was a group of senior citizens at the table next to us, and I guess the pitch of the thing was out of the range of their hearing, because they kept complaining that it was taking their food so long to come out, and they almost left. My shrimp salad was suspiciously warm, but I didn't want to make an issue out of it. I could see that the young staff was already really overwhelmed!

Lets see, what else? We played mini-golf, during which it is usually more practical for me to yell "incomming!" than "fore!" because every time I ever played in the past I've managed to hit the ball everywhere but the actual green. I've hit it into drainage pipes, over ( thank God!) the heads of innocent bystanders, through fences and over walls. There was one memorable incident in Ocean City where the ball left the establishment of the mini-golf course entirely and just rolled on down the boardwalk.

This time, we were playing on a rooftop course, so I was really concentrating on keeping the ball in the general area of the putt-putt course. Desperate, I tried hitting it left handed, thinking that at least I wouldn't hit the ball so hard by accident and send it through somebody's windshield. To my astonishment, when I looked up to line up my "shot" ( such as it was) it was like someone had subtly adjusted the picture in my brain. It was a lot easier to figure out what the ball might or might not do if hit a certain way. I even got a hole in one! I wonder if I was so lousey at sports in school because somebody just told me "oh, you're right handed" and I believed them and never tried anything else?

The last night really WAS romantic. We packed a picnic dinner and ate it down by the beach as the moon was coming up. We walked in the surf and looked for shells. When we looked up we were surrounded by sea gulls. But I wasn't afraid. I was with The Hub in the cool moonlight night. Who could ask for anything more?