Peculiarities of living in Two Harbors

I've got two little things to relate today. One is a hazard of living in Two Harbors, the other is just local color.

Last night, Hobbes and Calvin and I went down to the General Store for some ice cream for dessert (Sweetie is teaching right now, so she was still at the lab). As we sat at a picnic table and ate it, a pair of young boys started playing a game at the volleyball court - not volleyball, of course, but one in which the older boy was making up the rules to the younger boy's detriment. When my boys finished, I suggested that they go see if the other boys wanted to play a bit, since we don't have much chance to play with kids around here. This lead to me meeting the mothers of the children. Now this is a common occurrence around here. Having a lot of visitors, you meet a lot of people in passing, and many of them are very friendly and interested in the fact that you live on the island, etc. One of the women was very talkative. She was a middle school teacher from somewhere in the LA area. We talked about sharks - she's terrified of them having witnessed a shark attack when she was younger (a girl lost her leg), so she was trying to overcome her fear of the ocean by coming out to Catalina on her friends' sailboat with her kids. She also said she wanted to instill in her boys a sense of an adventurous life. Apparently, she used to do adventurous things with her dad when she was a kid, and now she was trying to pass that on. We talked for quite a while until it was nearly dark. The boys didn't mind; they were playing in the sand (oblivious to the other children about). I guess there's no real point to this anecdote (in my fraternity, they referred to these as "Cheese stories", since my nickname was Cheese), just that this happens all the time and is a nice benefit of living in a tourist destination. (Well, this tourist destination, anyway.)

On our way back to the house, we saw the local insane cat sleeping in the middle of the road. For some reason, this cat likes to curl up in a little ball on the dusty, hard-packed road surface. Usually, it's just off to the side, where it's only about 10% likely to be run over, but on this evening, with the light fading, it was dead smack in the middle of the road. The first time I saw it, I thought it was one of the feral cats that are all over town, but this one, despite its matted coat and odd behavior, has a collar with a tag. The owners have even gone so far as to put out a traffic cone with a sign that reads "Caution Lazy Cat". I've got to get a picture.

Life in the TH, baby.