Pink Feldspar: vaca

I took that pic in 2008 before Ike ripped through, that damage is from a previous hurricane. I think all my other gulf beach pix are on the old laptop that I can't even boot up anymore. I'm sure some are on blogs somewhere, maybe in the old private ones.

Oh, here we go, found a few, lemme see if I can paste this over from March 5, 2008. Sorry but the thumbnails don't click to bigger any more, links were broken when photobucket updated something.

I got to see my favorite sploit in the whole world after 6 months of nonseeing, which was pretty cool. They had raised an orphaned mourning dove from chickhood, and I got to see it fly around the house.

Now I shall torture you with an excessive amount of ocean and pink feldspar pictures, part of my obsessive nature. My original pink feldspar post was on April 22, 2007, in case you feel compelled to check it out. Basically just said it was my fave stone, that I think it looks awesomely cool in high class buildings, and I posted a few pictures I found on the internet.

So anyway, our first view from the sea wall. Yes, that is a solid wall of fog.

I can't help it, I have to take ocean pics. I guess it's because I'm landlocked and never see it.

Sea chickens...

Here's where you start seeing the granite. Scott walked out to the end of a rock wall built out into the ocean and got these pictures. The long building on that pier, we found out later, is a super long skinny lounge.

You'll see it in several pictures. I thought the last picture in this group was fantastic, Scott really caught that wave.

I waited on a big rock while he walked out there. I was getting tired and easily get vertigo, so it seemed like a bad idea for me to walk all the way out there and risk a broken ankle. But I sat there reveling in all the pink feldspar around me, and when he brought the camera back, I took these pictures. I got my shoes in there for reference. Parts of some rocks were almost solid pink, and other parts glowed in what light made it through the fog.

I honestly couldn't see how orangy-pink that looked until I got off it.

And this bit is later in the year after watching Ike on the weather channel take out my daughter's planned wedding on the beach, written on Sept 18, 2008.

As for the wedding... The minister they already paid seems to be stranded on Galveston with no power or running water, and who knows if he even still has an office, so they went to a Justice of the Peace. Without any explanation, they were shooed out of the office and the door was firmly locked in their faces. I told her that the Houston offices are probably so overwhelmed by all the damage that they just can't do anything else right now. So what do you do? They still have another week off together, which may not happen again for another year, so Scott got on the phone and told her they oughta run off to San Antonio (Ike didn't go that way) and get married and have fun. Go see Sea World or the Alamo or something. We sent them some money several days before Ike hit, but it doesn't look like their post office is up and running yet, so we don't know if the card is sitting at the post office or blew away somewhere. We're thinking we might put a stop payment on the check and just transfer the money to Sploit's local account, and she can write a check to put into their joint account there.

I can't even imagine being more involved with Ike than this. There are thousands of people whose homes are simply just gone now, and thousands more not being allowed back to their homes yet, and the beach will NEVER be the same. We were there just 6 months ago and got pictures and video, and I'm so glad we did, because it'll be years before they've got that fixed up pretty again. We were planning on going back next February to hang out in one of the big pretty hotels on the ocean front, but that whole area was devastated. Scott is just sick about it, he really fell in love with Galveston.

So I'll end this with a link back to the pictures and videos of the beach at Galveston along Seawall Blvd. Adieu, with a broken heart. Because this whole blog is named after the granite making up the seawall there, as per the picture at the top of this page. (Don't worry, this blog will stay.) Pink granite is my fave rock ever, as per this post I made. 3-5-08 Galveston seawall And Galveston is where Sploit saw the ocean for the first time in her life, and got her feet wet, which you can see in that post, along with more pink feldspar info. Just watching that video now gets me misty.

And I guess the Galveston Island Webcams are gone. Some of the buildings made it, but what you see here is mostly all gone now. Check out the dates at the tops of the pictures. Those are the last pictures those live webcams took before the island was evacuated and Ike took them out. I put these in time order, and they are from all over the island, so you can get a sense of how this thing hit. You get natural ocean fog there, and the first pic is early morning, so it's still ok, but notice near the bottom of the first pic that there is an intact fence and trees. ALL that is gone and under water now.