Super Saturday

Yesterday was SO MUCH FUN. We spent the day doing stuff as a family (78% of a family - we missed you Summer & Rachel!). It doesn't get much better than that (unless we are 100% percent anyway).

We started off at the Orange County Marble Show.

There were chances to learn from marble experts.

 And lots of opportunities to ooh and ah over cool marbles...

...like this one which was maybe 2 inches in diameter and had a city inside.

There were nifty wood things to display your marble collection on.

One nice guy told the kids that they could each pick out ten of these marbles for free - fun!

I took a while choosing some beautiful marbles made by the Santa-esque guy in the marble vest. He made all these at the Jabo plant. He told me you can rent the equipment and make your own marbles. When I bought ten of his marbles, he said, "Thank you for liking my art." I really liked that. I'll have to say that whenever someone buys a book from me (if I ever get around to selling them).

This was my favorite table. If I had money to burn, I would have had a bonfire right here! The guy takes credit cards because...

...he was selling all these gorgeous marbles from different artists. They were expensive. 

My favorite ones were the galaxy marbles like in the picture below. They were amazing! It was really like holding a little universe in your hand. Because you look through a convex surface, it looks so much bigger inside than you expect. I picked up my favorite and asked, "How much?" He nonchalantly said, "Oh, for that one, $5,000.00." Eek!

While the kids were waiting for me to make my final purchases, I let them mess around with my camera in the hall of the hotel. This was my favorite snapshot, by far.

We got back on the freeway and headed to the beach! Woohoo!

It was an unusual day at the beach. For one thing, we saw a sea lion swim up close where the people were swimming! By this photo, he (she?) was further away, but at one point, the sea lion was as close to the sand as where the water would come up to my torso. He (for the sake of simplicity) popped up and the woman swimming close to him yelled and ran for shore. The sea lion simultaneously yelped and dove in the opposite direction. I don't know who was more startled.

The other weird thing that happened was that Gwen was stung by a stingray! We have been going to that beach for decades and that has NEVER happened. She was in pain and bloody, so Stan and I went to ask the lifeguard what to do for her and he called another lifeguard who came and picked her up in a jeep. He took her back to the lifeguard station where they have buckets and hot water, just for stingray victims. Yeah, victims plural. There were four others when she got there and five new ones when she left. They just kept moving down the row as new victims arrived and chatted while they filled up with new hot water as the buckets cooled off. One of the lifeguards said there were more stings yesterday because the water was calmer than usual and stingrays like calm water. Chalk one up for rough surf, huh?

I didn't get a lot of pictures, but here is one of my boy at the beach. One of the best things about the beach was hanging out with the Pellegrinos :)

And, finally, some of the marbles I bought. The two dark ones are Stan's, the two small ones are vintage, the two marbles next to the biggest one were made by Santa Claus Man and the last one, the purple and green is a
Jabo Joker 3 Run.