Moon Jellies & Smudging Wands

Spent the majority of the day in the water with my daughter making the most of the very last day of her summer holiday. We went kayaking in Deep Cove for the 1st time together (she got some practice in her summer camp and seems to like it!) and than went for a cherry picnic in Deep Cove's beautiful and quiet little beach. Followed, of course, by a swim in the cool water noon water (the tide was coming in). I noticed many moon jellies in the water earlier as we were kayaking - it was hard to tell if they were alive or dead, since they looked mostly passive and nearly floated above the water surface. I did not expect to see them closer to the shore - and so many of them. I asked a lady on the beach if they sting, and she said they do; however, while knocking into tiny or bigger ones was inevitable for a swimmer with so many of them in the water, I did not feel any stinging so I just kept on going... Coming out of the cove, once my skin dried in the hot noon sun, I couldn't help but notice that my skin smelled a little like clay... Which is how slimy and slippery the cove's floor is.

There's a dock/diving board in Deep Cove's beach, and there were three kids playing on it. At first I didn't want to interfere with their play, so I kept swimming way past it. But when they were still there when I returned, I figured that I might as well climb on the dock and enjoy the sun for a bit. As long as you don't try to hard to pretend like you're an adult around kids, they usually won't mind a grown-up being next to them... And if anything, you'll learn a thing or two that you didn't know before. They were lying on the dock facing the water, and talking about crabs... Well, the water in Deep Cove is clear enough that you can see the crabs crawling underneath the water from some 3-4m waters... It was crawling sideways as it should... And they were also catching moon jellies and watching them melt in the sun (it does not take very long...). They also told me that the moon jellies don't sting, which turns out to be true. Only the big purple jelly fish here are of the stinging kind.

I also tried some kai perfume oil which I was surprised to find at a little cute shop called Room6. It's kinda fun at first, with beachy and heady white florals (I think the idea behind it is exotic tropical flowers like gardenia, pikake and frangipani), but after a couple of hours, the white musk takes over and now I'm regretting that I've put it on. Might take a day or more for it to subside and before I can test any of my perfumes again reliably...

While packing orders this afternoon in between beach hopping, a courier stopped by with a giant box reeking of a tea shop aroma... It was no other than the samples of the new tins I'm planning to use when the new teas are ready this fall; plus about 50(!) samples of teas that I've never asked for. Some of them might be useful (lapsang suchong, white tea, organic assam and darjeeling), but most of them are just fun fruity flavours of aromatized teas that would probably end up as gifts in my private tea parties in October and to friends who enjoy fruity aromatized teas.

The day went along quite uneventful - went to the post office to ship orders in the afternoon, stopped at the health food store for some school snacks and got revolted by freshly bound smudging wands of cedar and sage - the aroma is so potent it was sickening to be around it... Yet, I'm somehow haunted by it and if I know myself at all, I will be at that shop again tomorrow sniffing that disturbing, medicinal-bordering-on-the-toxic aroma.

Then we went for another beach picnic (watermelon with Macedonian feta) and another long swim in the (warmer) water of Sunset Beach, and spotting my seal friend yet again; and baking chocolate cookies in the evening, so we have something to send the teacher on 1st day of school rather than wait till the last... And also to say goodbye to the horseback riding teacher because we're starting with a new one. So the day ends with the smell of cookies baking, and being up since 6am (and needing to wake up around that time tomorrow and the rest of the week), I think it's time to close the lid on my laptop...