Day deux

Ah, another day come and gone. Well, today I finished Shogun Total War and was once again declared Sei Tai Shogun. I spent a good part of the day walking the beach. On three separate occasions I walked the length of the beach, once on the upper dunes and the other times down by the surf (Note to the reader, walking on loose sand is hard and painful... totally do the surf over the dunes). I also spent a good part of my day swimming and playing with my brother (new found respect for swimmers). I figure if I spend 30+ minutes swimming each day I'm here it might offset the billions of calories I'm eating (doughnuts for breakfast, ice cream and burgers for lunch, and then a huge dinner accompanied by soda and topped off with more desert). As it turns out this is not just the place, but rather the exact place my friend grew up. She was excited to tell me about it which makes me smile. Now I've got a new itinerary of making sure to hit all the good spots in town. Its always more fun with directions given from a local, especially if that local is a friend you can trust. Funny thing is I've been to just about all the places she mentioned, granted that was years ago so I should go back (better plan than sitting on my butt and watching TV).

Today I saw dolphins and more flying fish. I also spent some time crab chasing (a wonderful pastime, should become a sport some day) and managed to corner a few long enough to pet them (yeah I know, petting crabs sounds odd, but really once you catch one of those fast camouflage buggers what are you going to do with it?). The crabs do this really cool thing when they're cornered, with their legs they do a glug glug digging stroke and then they fwump the sand on top of themselves so that only their eye-stalks poke out. So if they weren't impossible to see before, they are even harder afterwords. Also their effective vision range appears to be about sixteen feet and their top running speed is about six miles per hour (all of the numbers provided here are based on my field notes and not official data from some big wig schmancy science thingy). The real trick is, to corner them away from any other crab holes and chase them until they run out of steam (yes crabs are steam powered). This only takes two to five minutes of intense chasing. Once their steam supply is depleted they give up and pledge their eternal homage to you (...yeah that's what I said...).

I also spent the day reading about all the local ghost stories. Did you know that psychics define the words ghost and spirit differently? Ghosts are shadows of people that relive actions, they don't do much thinking but often come from unnatural deaths. Spirits on the other hand are fully aware and dangerous because they can think and act rather than just go through some motion over and over. Now you know! And the other half of the battle is violence.

Violence: the -ence makes it a quality like patience or permanence. But the Vi part is strictly latin. Vi was the root of the word Vir meaning man. But what was man to the romans? Well if girls (puellae) were a little less than boys (pueri) then women (feminae) should be related to the word men (Vir) but it's not sadly. Remember that latin had a huge amount of sexism built into the root of the language. Sadly the root Fem seems to mean more of "not masculine" where as the male root Vi means "Power, force, or ability." Much in the same way that Ki, Qi, or Chi means power. Thus reaching heaven by violence means doing it through force or power, not necessarily through bloodshed (as this could mean through great struggle, though I believe that bloodshed is the implied meaning). In the same way is violence the other half of the battle (since knowing is the first half).