Birthday Month 2023 August 22: Birthday Proper

[elisem]

Last night at the workbench I finished the aquamarine necklace called "Will the Sea Remember Me?" It has a sterling silver lobster clasp which has a swivel, so the necklace can be untwisted without removing it. Useful little thing, a swivel clasp.

Here it is in the Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1550006235/will-the-sea-remember-me-short-necklace

I woke early today because it's a shipping day and I need to be near the door to hear when the USPS folks thump. (I have a note on the door asking them please to thump, because I am hard of hearing and cannot hear regular knocking very easily.) So with any luck I'll be able to get a good batch of new pieces up. There are a lot of them ready to go, and have been for a while. (See also "I need to have four of me to do everything on my task list.")

Today's perfume is Voodoo Queen from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, since it seems appropriate to wear a rare scent today.

I will almost certainly update this post again as my birthday proper continues. Whee!

What is your relationship to the sea? To other entities of water?

Comments

[jazzfish]

Happy day!

The Atlantic Ocean's always been "the ocean" to me. Standing knee-deep in waves as the sun sets behind me is good for my soul in ways I can't explain.

I grew up with the mighty Missip' (one set of grandparents lived in Helena right on the river) so it's a weird combination of mythic and Perfectly Normal. This sense only increased when I read John McPhee's "Atchafalaya". I suspect if I'd grown up here (Vancouver BC) I'd feel the same way about the Mighty Fraser.

Lakes are nice and all but there's *waves hands* just not enough motion, maybe. Rivers and creeks and mountain streams are my lifeblood.

[madgastronomer]

I grew up only about 20 minutes from the beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida. The warm swells and waves are one of the few things I miss about that states. The Pacific is beautiful, and I love her, but she is very cold. I'd much rather be able to stay in the water until I'm all wrinkled up than just a few minutes.

Once, the town I grew up in was two towns, Melbourne and Eau Gallie. Now it's only Melbourne. But I still went to Eau Gallie High School. The locals say that Eau Gallie means "rocky waters" in French, but "gallie" isn't a French word. It may or may not have originally been "galet", which I'm told means pebble. Eau Gallie isn't on the ocean, it's on the Indian River, which is open to the ocean at both ends and has several inlets and estuaries, but is fresh in between. It is, indeed, very rocky along the edges there.



You used to be able to stand along the river in Eau Gallie and see across it to a huge statue of a dragon brooding over four hatching eggs over on Meritt Island. The little spit of land she was on is still called Dragon Point. Alas, she wasn't looked after, and crumbled.



You can just see her eggs in the second picture, though they're mostly covered by tree. I can't find a good shot of her eggs, but we went out in the boat once to see them.

The dragon's name was Annie.

That was a long sidetrack that I made! But I wanted to show you the dragon, and had to explain how I got there, via the rocky waters. The necklace reminds me of that river as well as the beach, which was not particularly rocky, so I guess the imagery must work for me!

Here, have a song by my friend Sooj, which very much echoes how I feel about the ocean:


That embed didn't work. The song is here

[edschweppe]

Hippo, birdie, two ewe! (https://www.sandraboynton.com/sboynton/hippobirdiecards.html)

I do love the oceans, the lakes, the mighty rivers and the tiniest of streams. (Slush puddles in crosswalks, not quite so much.) I spent a week on a wee little rock off the coast of New Hampshire last month and loved almost every minute. Haven't visited any of my local rivers recently, though, and I should remedy that soon.

[lokifan]

Happy birthday! And what an absolutely gorgeous necklace.

I love the sea! And rivers and lakes, but seas especially. Bonus points for the Atlantic - I had holidays in the south of France and Cornwall as a kid, and I love the proper waves you get. The Mediterranean's calm doesn't appeal to me as much. But when I lived briefly in Italy, I had a wonderful time swimming alone in a beautiful aquamarine sea in spring; the Italians wouldn't go into the water until it was properly summer.

[pameladean]

I never saw the sea at all until I went to the U.K. on a college English program, and the first view was of the English channel. It was a bright October day in Brighton, but I did also get to see it from the cliffs of Dover on a very foggy freezing day in October. Later on a college roommate got married on the beach in Maine, and I saw the Atlantic. It was a bright October day in Brighton, but I did also get to see it from the cliffs of Dover on a very foggy freezing day in October. Later on yet my mother moved to Tampa for work, so I saw both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic again. And finally, I went out to California with Eric when he moved back for a while, and he took me to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach, where I first saw the Pacific and got to look at tidepools.

The sea is always a rare and usually unexpected glimpse, never to be taken for granted.

Also happy birthday! I am sending you a thing, but am having dopey computer difficulties. I'll resolve them when it's (comparatively, good grief) cooler.

P.

[kaffy_r]

Happy Birthday to you! May the coming year prove to be peaceful, happy, surrounded by friends and loved ones, and filled with as much (or as little) adventure as possible.

My relationship with water. Hmmm. I grew up separated from the Bay of Fundy by only a low hill (which we called the North Mountain because mainland Nova Scotia is unfamiliar with true mountains, although Cape Breton is much more hilly.) I lived on an inlet of the Bay called the Minas Basin. Fundy has the highest tides in the world, and all its daughter basins and rivers also have significant tides that rise and fall, in some places by as much as two miles, every 6 hours or so. Only one of the rivers I grew up near wasn't completely tidal, and I could measure the day by checking how much of the mudflats were showing on the banks of the Cornwallis and the Avon.

Fundy is very cold, but my brother and I grew up swimming in it. The rule my mother had was that when we were swimming in Fundy, as opposed to the red shale beaches on the Minas Basin, we could only stay in the water until our lips turned blue. Really. Like other kids in my area, I swam underwater in salt water without thinking of what that might be doing to our eyes.

My stepfather was, in part, a fisherman. I grew up knowing what weirs were for. The only waters I swam in that I got nervous about were the freshwater lakes around us (long story, not important). There are many reasons I love Chicago; one of them is that it sits on the shore of an inland sea big enough to have tiny tides and wide enough that I can't see the opposite shore. I don't think I could live in a place that doesn't have water lapping on its borders.

Sorry for the lengthy ramble. And again, have a wonderful birthday.

[carbonel]

Happy belated birthday!

I have almost no relationship with any sea. I grew up near the shores of Lake Michigan, and that was the "big water" for me. And now after all these years in Minneapolis, Lake Nokomis is my "little water."

[athenais]

Happy born day!

I am a triple fire sign who needs to be adjacent to water or my happiness is incomplete. I have always lived on either an island, an isthmus-island, next to a bay or next to the sea. In my thirties I spent eight difficult land-bound years that caused the light in my eyes to dim. I might be better off financially living inland, but you'll never get me away from my beloved Pacific Ocean again. Lakes are okay, rivers are better, bays/sounds/giant lakes are pretty good, the sea is the best.