Hot feet!

After work I decided to go to the South Jetty Beach in Fort Pierce and take some pictures of the beach. So right around 5pm on a nice hot sunny day I get to the parking lot. The little voice in my head says “take your shoes…..the sand will be hot”. Hot? Hah! I’m a native Floridian, I’m *used* to hot. So the little lazy voice overrides that with a complaint of then having to carry the sandals. Keep in mind my tender toes have been stuffed and sweating inside sneakers for 10 hours at this point.

I grab my camera and hop out barefooted……right onto the warm black asphalt parking lot. There must have been someone parked there before me because it wasn’t toooooo bad. Lock the truck and head over to the pavilion that goes to the walk. As I cross the parking lot, I find myself walking on the white lines because they aren’t hot. The orginial little voice repeats “the sand will be hot” but hey I’m stubborn. Get over to the pavilion in one piece and figure the sand can’t be worse than the parking lot! Bravely I step down onto the dune. My first thought was, “this isn’t too bad”.

See, there’s this problem that the nerves in your feet take a few milliseconds to send the signal of “HOT! HOT!” to the brain. My brain told my feet to man up and keep going. Unfortunatly for my feet, my legs listen to my brain and not them. Now I’m about halfway down the sandy walk…and my feet are sending up smoke signals. All of a sudden the HOT HOT signal fully reaches my brain! OW!! Desperate for pain relief, I realize the walk posts are casting a foot sized shadow and plop both feet there for a second. “Now what?” asks the first voice triumphantly.

There’s a point of no return when you are in a situation like this. There I am, standing in a shadow of a piling realizing that it’s about the same distance back to the truck as it is down to the water. As my feet cool down in the shadow, I get brave and decide to just go for it. I mean, I could always run to the ocean right?

So the second stubborn voice reminds me to get a move on before someone sees me trying to balance in the piling shadow. Off we go! Having cooled down for a second, my feet were brave. They waited until we got to the actual beach sand to resume the distress signals. Now here’s another problem-the dune sand was hard and you can walk fast on hard sand. Beach sand is soffffft and you sink in with each step. The faster you try to walk, the further you sink with each step! As the lava temperature sand starts flowing over the tops of my feet I realize I should’ve brought the shoes.

At this point I’ve realized that I’m going to have burned feet. No way out of it. I start analyzing the pain as the ocean seems to retreat further away. Heel? Nope, heel is fine, nice and thick. Sole? Ok, that’s a little hot but no sizzling feelings. Ball? Ball is as thick as heel. Pads of toes? Whimpering and whining. Joints of toes? ON FIRE! I definintely feel some sizzling from there. By now it’s too late, it just hurts and I still go.

Finally I get to the ocean and Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I don’t even care when the first wave runs up my legs and soaks the bottom of my shorts! I stood there for a couple of minutes pondering the fact that I will have to go back the way I came….(sigh). Well, too late now! Once my toes are cooled down to whining stages versus screaming stage I head up the beach for some pictures. As I’m sure you can imagine, I stayed in the water as much as possible.

After about an hour, it was time to finish off the burns and head back. I don’t remember much of the walk back as I was running mentally through every thought I could to distract my feet from their two minute walk on fire! Thankfully that beachs has showers with the foot options so I rinsed off my poached piggies until they went back down to whining stages.

A few hours later at home I dared to finally look……sure enough, two nice big blisters on my second toes were there. The other toes all have let me know they too will have blisters when I wake up tomorrow.

Moral of the story: TAKE YOUR SHOES. SAND IS HOT. :)

I did however get some nice pictures so it was all worth it!

Foot prints in wet beach sand towards viewer by SusansZooCrew

Long life CF bulbs? Nope. At least, not the one I've tried.

About a year ago I tried one of the compact flourescent bulbs in my fan's light fixture. I've only replace the "regular" type bulbs about every 2 years in this fixture, so when the package said these CF bulbs would last up to 5 years I was even happier! The price was about 4x the cost of a name brand incandescent bulb, but I figured the longer life would make up for that.

Fast forward to two nights ago. I had noticed my light had been getting dim the last month-I was having to turn on extra lights if I wanted to draw (defeating the purpose of a more efficent bulb). Two nights ago I started seeing light flickering out of the corner of my eye. Thinking it was the cat's shadow from jumping down, I ignored it. A few minutes later the light started turning itself off and on! It looked like someone was playing with a dimmer switch. After a minute of this the dog started barking at the lights-she hardly ever barks so that was creepy. I got her quiet and sat and watched the bulb die a slow death. It took about 5 minutes to die, turning off and on, dimming and undimming, putting on a light show. Much different from a normal bulb that goes POP and is done (and then you get to shake it to make sure it's realllllly dead).

So I got half the life out of a 4x more expensive bulb. To boot, there's MERCURY in this bulb. Am I supposed to drive 20+ miles to a recycling facility to discard this? My other option is to poison my future groundwater. Not a great choice. What's so bad about the incandescent bulbs? Guess what-they are planning on making it impossible to buy the incandescent bulbs in only a few more years! "They" being the US government, Europe, and a couple other countries. Why?!?!?! I have to imagine the heat that a normal bulb puts out into the world can't be as bad as the mercury the CF bulbs use/contain. Unless they start a recycle program in the stores that sell the bulbs, most people are going to trash them.

Moral of the story: This is one person who will be stocking up on "normal" bulbs when we get closer to the mandated CF dates. I'll take a little heat over short life and mercury.

GO BULBS! :) :)

Susan and crew

www.zazzle.com/susanszoocrew

Addendum: My typical usage patterns were exactly the same when I was using the normal bulbs, so that did not contribute to the short life :).

Neat Batman poster!

I finally ended up liking the Joker character in the last Batman, just because they made him seem kind of human (warped human, but human)...... and now he's back! The poster for the movie is neat, check it out here:

Batman Under The Red Hood by batman
More Batman Posters

Pretty cool huh?

Having a cat can open doors.....literally!

I'm a cat owner...although sometimes I think he owns me. Or at least he thinks he does!
A long time ago he learned that if I did not shut the door all the way, he could hook his paw underneath and pull it open. This has now lead to him thinking he owns EVERY door, to be opened at his whim, regardless of whether or not the door is actually shut all the way.
He now also thinks that if he can not open the door, if he stands and meows pitifully and loudly I will come open the door for him.

I do have to admit, sometimes it'll work and I will open the door for him-I figure he needs to go use his litterbox. Several months of this and now I have my hands full untraining him! You see, when he paws the door it rattles loudly in the frame. At 3am, this is not desireable and leads to all sorts of objects becoming airbourne projectiles. Then, a few hours later when I get up, I forget what I tossed at the cat door and end up tripping over it!

So, you see, now I never have to worry about doors being closed to me. I just have to worry about doors being closed to my cat! That and things I've thrown at 3am that might trip me up at 6.....


That's my cat in the sketch below :)

Pen and Ink sketch of relaxing animals by SusansZooCrew
Browse more Multiple Magnets

Lefty and Proud of it!

Lefty and Proud of it!

Lefty and Proud of it! With Penguin, blue writing by SusansZooCrew

Awwwwww isn't he cute?

National Left Handers Day is coming up! August 13th. Cool huh?

Being left handed has honestly never really posed a problem for me. My handwriting is a little scraggly but who knows-it may have been that way if I had been a righty. I learned most things right handed because, well, that's the way I was shown how to do it. After learning it righty (like throwing a ball), I would also go back and try it left handed. Usually what happens is I have more strength right handed but better accuracy left handed.

Occasionally something will come up that I apparently do reversed (like how to flip spirals when cutting them for binding), but to me it's normal :). Everyone else is reversed! You're all doing it wrong! Ha! ....... ok just kidding :). (kind of).

They say that left handed people are more artistic, and that I have found to be true. I have yet to meet a lefty that doesn't do some form of art, and many of the great art people I know are left handed. Brushes work in either hand so at least we don't have to buy special art supplies. I have found left handed calligraphy to be rather tricky, I end up just doing it the same way as a right handed person and just turn the paper at a different angle.

One thing that does get annoying is when I'm writing something and someone in a store (or wherever) exclaims loudly, "You're a lefty!". Usually it's said in a tone of voice like, "You've got four heads!" "Your hair is turning green!", that sort of thing. Personally I never notice what hand someone is unless I'm looking (like when I'm watching the spraypaint guys and trying to figure out how they do things.....then I noticed who is lefty). I guess since the difference was never made a big deal of it's just not important to me.

Now, being right vs left eyed.......that's a different story. I found out exactly what that meant when I was up north one Thanksgiving during college with a friend of mine. Her boyfriends family did the country Thanksgiving, hayrides, picnic tables, loose turkeys running around (we didn't eat those), the whole nine yards. There was even a shooting area set up and they conned me into going for it. I consistantly missed the target the same amount, the same place! One of the guys looked at me and went waiiiiiiiiitttttt are you left handed or right handed? I said lefty.... he said, well, you're probably left eyed also.......swap shoulders. I switched the rifle over to the other side. Viola! I hit the target every time after that! Ok so they weren't all bullseyes, but close enough for any problems that piece of paper may have caused :). Lesson learned: to hit the target, use your dominant eye!

Ok, the dog wants out and the cat is getting into something he shouldn't so my left hand (and the rest of me) are going to sign off for now. If you are or know a left handed person, stock up on stickers and wear em proudly on August 13th!

http://www.lefthandersday.com/

Wow......this will kill your eyes if you stare too long......

Ran across this one via a zazzle forum. Not my product but neat enough to share!

Illusionary2 Poster by djskagnetti
Poster printing from zazzle

Don't stare tooo long or your eyes may fall out :) :) :)

Image of the week-Blue Roses Inversion I

I plan on featuring a new product/image every week that I've designed/photographed.

I decided that drying the roses I've been given wasn't
the only thing I could do, and discovered the unique beauty of inversion
that I've always loved could sucessfully be applied to roses too!
So, without further ado, hope you all enjoy a beautiful inversion of
a rose picture.

(Although this is a mousepad, if you click the link it's also available on tons
of other products including the ever popular customizable notecards!)

Blue glowing roses against a dark background by SusansZooCrew
See other Long stem rose Mousepads