Now that it’s the end of summer, I’ve been looking online for a new coat. My current one is creamy white and puffy, but it’s also kind of beat up and stained after five years of roughing it in the winter wilderness. I like to lean on stuff while waiting for the public bus, and washing the coat is a little bit of an ordeal because it has to go in the dryer with three clean tennis balls that act as little beaters and fluffers for the downy feathers inside. This is what the label actually says to do, so I do it, but I feel like I’m knocking around actual ducks in there and it gives me a strange sensation.

So I think I’m going to opt for a new color and style this year, and keep my current coat for backup. I’m not really familiar with the current choices though, because it’s summer, and also, here in a college town everybody and their frat brother wears rain jackets from The North Face that have names like “Bionic” and “Mammatus.” Mammatus is the name of those weird clouds, isn’t it?

Truthfully, I guess a rain jacket would be a better investment than the cropped wool ones with multiple buttons that I usually covet because wool, while stylish, is a bear when it’s wet. I mean, a sheep. It really smells like a sheep when it’s wet.

So I’ve gotten some promotional postcards made, and I’ve also done up a little e-mail promo. I plan to do a bit of advertising soon by mailing these to every address, postal and electronic, that I’ve managed to collect into my very professional stickynoted database.

I feel pretty spammy, I admit, but I hope nobody throws them away, you know? I am sure it will happen, many times, but perhaps the right person will see my stuff, maybe somebody like Oprah, who will offer me an amazing deal on my brand new book idea: illustrations of animals, wearing funny clothes. An animal in a top hat is never not hilarious.

“Stop for me, it’s the claw.”

My boyfriend and I finally found ourselves at the beach last week, after spending almost three months talking about going. Since Chris is the finance king, I trusted him to find us a place to stay that wouldn’t cause him the physical pain of gripping an open wallet. You can spend $200 a night to look out over the water, or $50 a night to be within walking distance of the same water, so figure that one out. $50 a night seemed a bit grubby to me, but Chris reassured me that this was Days Inn, a recognizable chain, with breakfast and internet! Once there, I was won over by the washcloths that were folded into fans and tucked into little pockets made by the hand towels, a trick I learned during my own stint as a housekeeper. (I could probably come up with a great post about that job, which, while having a few happy perks, pretty quickly deteriorated into something like middle school. The cleaning was fine, actually kind of fun, but gossip ran rampant. We’ll see. It’s kinda embarrassing. But nobody reads this.)

So, we ended up going to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, “America’s Beach Playground” where you can ride a roller-coaster next to the ocean, play miniature golf alongside a mechanical elephant, and get yourself a title loan all on the same block. Myrtle Beach is also home to every possible incarnation of those beachwear stores you can think of. There were Wings, Kings, Twins, and Eagles, each one promising temporary tattoos and free hermit crabs.

For our first night in town, Chris and I went to Hook’s—the restaurant, not to be confused with Captain Hook’s, the miniature golf course down the street—where I revolted Chris by indulging in both steamed clams and oysters. As I watched the steam rise off of their rocky shells in the buffet bar I guess you could say I was hypnotized. After stuffing ourselves to the gills with gills, I ate the tiniest little rectangular slice of key lime pie, with the tiniest wedge of lime on top. I didn’t take a picture because I seem to do that enough already, but the slice was only about the size of a domino. And if you’re concerned, I found that above crab claw in the sand on the beach. It’s not like I smuggled it out of the restaurant, but that’s probably similar to where this one came from.

After eating, we went to the nearby Piggly Wiggly grocery where a man told us to do ourselves a favor and get the same beer he was getting two cases of, which was Yuengling. “Ever tried it?” But of course, are you crazy? We didn’t buy much of anything since we’d already loaded the car up with Little Debbies for the drive, but I was amazed at the amount of lottery tickets behind the checkout counter. North Carolina didn’t even have a lottery until 2005, probably just one reason we’re the “Rip Van Winkle State.”

The next day after breakfast, Chris and I perused the hotel’s lobby for pamphlets on interesting things to do. The aquarium and zoo were our top contenders, but after we spent a second morning in the glaring sun jumping through waves and dodging frisbees, more time in the sun and/or near other people sounded tortuous to us. We opted instead for an evening spent in our hotel room eating chips, drinking beer (instead of the Yuengling, we’d done ourselves the cruel disservice of buying Pabst Blue Ribbon), and watching Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe as the air conditioning lapped against our sunburned shoulders.

After the sun went down and the shiny guys on their rental scooters stopped accelerating themselves past the shiny women in their bikinis, we decided to go wade in the water one last time. “Wading” turned into “splashing,” and then nearly into “falling,” rendering clothes unnecessary. I stripped them off in joyous freedom, my matching underwear set looking for all the world like a regular bathing suit. Talk about serendipitous, because I rarely match my underwear to itself—let alone my underwear to my clothes, like some girls manage. The water felt warm because the air was cool, so Chris and I sat down in the tide and dug mud pies—just like we’d wanted to do, but never would have done, in the bright afternoon sunlight among the 6-year-olds with water wings on. Going to the water at night is easily my favorite part of a beach vacation. The walk back to our room in only my sandy undergarments was inelegant, though.

Now that we’re back home, we’ve decided to start planning another vacation. We’re thinking a cruise, and we look for it to happen in roughly… three years.

I went home to Chapel Hill this week so that I could gather one last batch of desired belongings from my bedroom, but I found out that during my absence my room had become something of a self-storage unit for my parents. My mom had put aside for herself a teetering pile of old clothes she “might still want” but wasn’t sure about, and my stepdad apparently thought he’d help her out by moving her entire fabric collection up there as well. This stuff made the process of organizing my stuff a little harder, but I managed by shoving all of their stuff into a corner. George Carlin once did a monologue about stuff, and I find it to be very true. We can’t function without our stuff, but other people’s stuff? NOT IMPORTANT.

The only things I really cared about rescuing were my pop-up books, all given to me by my aunt. I’ve never bought a pop-up book for myself, and neither has anybody else, and it’s really only in my own collection that I’ve even seen most of these books.

Aka “Clever Cathy”

My first pop-up book was about the extinction of dinosaurs, given to me when I was zero years old. I suppose the book was more for my dad to enjoy than me, because its post-apocalyptic theme is a lot more serious for a baby than The Tale of Peter Rabbit—incidentally, my second book. Now that I’m 23 I don’t receive as many of these books, but I have at least 50 in all. Since they’re safely under my care again I decided to take some pictures of my old favorites:

It’s really kind of hard to take pictures of the more elaborate pop-ups (just try to envision the tornado and Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz in pop-up form), but check these out and see if you’re not excited by the possibilities of paper.

My aunt herself has a collection of frog figurines. Anybody else collect?

Ms. Neon Blue likes to accessorize her outfits with a few poofy feathers every now and then.