Life in the Summer

I’ve had kind of a slew of run-ins with creepy-crawlies recently. Ticks and jellyfish, mostly. And there was a spider in my bedroom yesterday, but I caught him in a jar and threw him outside.

The jellyfish, though, that’s the most exciting story, so I’ll share that one. :) I was surfing with my dad on Monday at La Jolla Shores, breaking in my brand-new wetsuit. It’s a spring suit, so it’s short-sleeved. (Winter suits, like the one my dad has, come down to your wrists and ankles.) We’d been out there for a long time already, almost two hours, when I was paddling back out on my board and managed to slam my hand all the way through a glob of slimy, globby purple stuff. I thought it was seaweed. It was gross, so I yanked my hand back out. After a second, though, my hand and wrist started to tingle, then sting and hurt. A lot—which is when I realized that, duh, seaweed’s not purple, that’s probably a jellyfish.

So I rolled off my board, got out of the water as fast as I could, yelled for my dad to watch my board, and ran off to the lifeguard station. No, they didn’t pee on it. They sprayed rubbing alcohol to disinfect it, and then told me to get back in the water because the salt would help with the swelling.

So I sat on my board in the shallows, bent in half so I could dip my arm in the water. A dinky little wave came in and I flailed and rolled off the side, then reoriented myself. Another dinky little wave came in and I fell off the back.

Yeah, I’m not so good at that sitting-on-the-board thing yet. What can I say? I’m still a beginner.