Beach days and more pictures

Hello. Today Mom and I finally made it to the beach. We went to Kingsport. It was quite pleasant, though a bit buggy. The sand near the water turns to clay so your feet sink right into the mud as you walk around. It was very satisfying for toe wiggling. The water was really super cold, but refreshing. I am now a more pleasant shade of tan than before.

I read a funny thing at the bookstore at the mall in New Minas yesterday that I wanted to mention. The books are, of course, grouped together by genre. The one shelf above the literature section was devoted to "Lit. Crit/Erotica". At first I laughed really hard to see Harold Bloom's book beside 10 Erotic Short Stories, but then I quickly sobered. I realized, "They're onto us!" The way I figure it, literary criticism is on some level just intellectual masturbation*. It makes perfect sense to place it beside the more openly masturbatory materials. How clever of the bookstore to make this connection.

The pictures I'm posting are from the Cape Breton Highland Park. I will again only post a few. The funny thing about two women from southern Ontario touring the Maritimes is that we feel compelled to take pictures of every mountain and view of the water that we see, since we have neither mountains nor large bodies of water back home (at least not close to where we specifically live). Anyway, I hope you like pictures of scenery.

*I only half believe that lit crit is intellectual masturbation. There are elements of that, of course, just as there are for every discipline. Ideas for ideas' sake are fun. However, for the record, I do believe that what intellectuals in the discipline of English do and talk about is important and has political implications for the world at large, in a way that I'm uncomfortable arguing that physical masturbation does (though I'm sure that you could argue this, especially about female masturbation, which still remains a taboo subject outside of Cosmo magazine).