sand castles

This is part one of my two part series entitled "The Lost Posts".

When I first got to Florida for thanksgiving break my dad started in on one of his stories that I hear every time I go down.  This one is about the app that he has for his phone that lets him find things just by asking it.  For some reason the thing he always asks it about is sand castle competitions, then shows me with pride how if it were May we could go to a sand castle competition.

This time however there actually was a sand castle competition going on down at Siesta Key.  I don't think my father was prepared for me to say that I actually wanted to go, so it became kind of like that episode of Seinfeld where George drives Susan's parents out to his nonexistent house in the Hamptons.

The sand castles were pretty cool I guess, here is the one from above from behind:

I mean the detail and craftsmanship was really intricate and cool but my father was reading me the article about the competition from the newspaper and they said that in order to get the sand to stick they mix it with Elmer's glue, which hardly seems fair to me.  I mean doesn't that just make it a sculpting competition?  I feel like the whole point of a sand castle competition is dealing with the medium and it's unreliability, not just mixing it with glue.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that the sand in Sarasota is so powdery that it would be impossible to build a sandcastle sans glue, but I don't know that that's really an excuse.  Maybe Sarasota just wasn't meant to have a sand castle competition.

Here is another one I liked:

For some reason I only took the back of this one and not the front but it was a cool design.  It was a castle on the other side and it wasn't until you walked around to the back that you realized there was supposed to be this giant dragon wrapped around it.  I think I liked this one the best because it was the only one that actually had a traditional fairy tale castle as part of it.  The one above was cool because it had the M.C. Escher thing going on, but sometimes you just want a good old fashioned castle you know?

And then there was this one which I guess is supposed to be characters from some Disney movie (Madagascar?), but I thought it was Nathanael.  Just chillin' in the hot tub, making the face he makes when he's watching tv.  I mean the resemblance is uncanny!

If the artist doesn't know nathanael directly then he must have had a vision, a vision of love.  I have those every night, and every morning when I wake up to find nathanael laying in bed next to me stroking my hair.