ACK Attack

[Donuts delivered with attitude.]

I left Nantucket last Saturday, red, well-read, and rolled. Let me deconstruct that alliteration for you. I was punished for my Scottish pastiness with some sunburn, made all the worse by the attack of some stealth mini jellyfish lurking the ocean one day. When I wasn't being stung by jellyfish at the beach, I read five novels, some terrific (Ben Loory's whimsical and witty Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day) and some trite (Glen Duncan's arrogant and overwritten The Last Werewolf). And true to my klutzy nature, I rolled my foot in our rental house's uneven driveway while wearing my "glamorous" heeled espadrilles from Barcelona. This week you can find me limping around with a scrape on my knee befitting for a five-year-old.


[When not being used as a Unitarian Church, you can hear opera singers practicing.]


I'm not the only one who knows how to make leisure difficult. My fellow vacationers were worse for the wear:


Overheard in the ice cream line: "I'm ready to go back to work. I'd stay here longer if I could work." This man clearly does not understand the point of a vacation.
Watching people cut pedestrians off on the street so they could run to their 9:30am yoga class. Isn't yoga meant to be relaxing?

Almost having to run over a man in the Stop & Shop parking lot because he was blocking the spot with his bike so his wife could get it. Getting food for your picnic lunch on the beach is like trying to get the prime spot at the watering hole, it gets ugly.


Pretending you're the effortlessly cool guy who can ride a moped is all the rage on Nantucket. However, trying to ride the thing down to the beach doesn't involve enough effort as we watched some guy go too slowly through the sand causing the bike to topple. He was fine, but lost his cool and turned right back around.Watching a woman at the nearby dinner table take the lime that came with her lobster and squeeze it into her water.

Ordering an eggcream at the drugstore soda fountain, only to have the sodajerk ask me why. I dunno, I didn't invent these oddball New England drinks!
Feeling left out because I didn't have a Northface windbreaker on our first rainy day. Even the priest was stylish, wearing one in black of course.

Hearing a woman tell her son that if he didn't stop pinching his sister in the ice cream line, the wafflecone witch would come and get him. He looked at the wafflecones in fear after that.
All of the above is a good example of East Coast aggression, how I've NOT missed it even if it does make for good comedy.

[Even though we were only on the island for six days, I had the daily cupcake schedule memorized by day two. Scary!]

This is my last post about Nantucket. If you didn't already gather, I had a hard enough time reapplying sunscreen consistently, let alone taking photos. This is the mark of a good vacation, despite the occasional injury.