Go Darke

I am one of the lost boys.

The Peter Pan (original) version he says, after some consideration, and not one of the kids from the vampire movie of the same name. (Probably before your time)

I often wonder if I have really grown up? My parents always seemed so seriously adult. Now that I’m there, in terms of time passed at least, I don’t think I’m ever going to get there. I mean I do grown up stuff… like pay taxes… and eh… I have insurance… and *thinks* I put moisturizer on my increasingly canyon-esque frown line. (Sometimes)

Everything else sorta got stuck in juvenility though and never really progressed into the seriousness that I was expecting at this age.

I’m glad I have kids, they are good camouflage, allowing me to act out my puerile tendencies in a socially acceptable manner. Otherwise it would just be a regular ‘failure to launch’ type of scenario and/or some form of madness. I can see why people do it¹

[1] Breed.

I built a tadpole… eh… (I spend some time considering whether it is an aquarium or a terrarium), enclosure with the five year old this weekend. I always caught tadpoles when I was ‘little’… and they always died. My parents never really showed any interest in my naturalist proclivities. I think the maximum involvement I got from my folks was handing me a mason-jar off the top shelf.

The fact that they went belly up after a couple of days was likely a relief for them.

Of course now that I’m older I know stuff. Like that tadpoles need to be fed (weirdly enough) and once they get their legs… they’ll need somewhere they can beach themselves. As you can see I’m quite enthusiastic about reliving my childhood… only better this time.

So once they start metamorphosing into froglets… we will start releasing them into the stream that runs through my garden. I think that’s a fair go. That stream eventually makes its way down to the river, where I imagine they will sing duets with Rupert the bear² (or whoever)… and do other amphibian type things, like engage in predation and French cooking.

[2] this definitely belies my age.

We also Mason-jarred this little… I want to say dude… but I think its a girl.

It’s a Eutricha capebsis. Or Cape lappet moth… which is quite a boring looking brown-job when its all grown up. But the transformation from this to that is quite educational… for the kids I mean… right?

… and then to round off the trifecta of man-child exploits I did some Free-diving this weekend.

At the moment the ocean is a chilly 13C (55F). When we arrived there were a couple of people exiting the water in their neoprene with their spearguns… which gave me pause… since I was in board-shorts and booties. (On Sunday I added a weight belt and long fins)

In any event, without a wetsuit it’s cold enough to get you… breathing a little quicker, ha ha, but after about five minutes your teeth stop chattering and you acclimatize… well I suppose to the point where you drop your body temperature too low and die.

There is narrow channel here where you can transition from the chop into (depending on the tide) a smoother area of ocean. There is a serious rip here that took me by surprise and I had to swim quite hard to clear the undertow… on my first day I got smashed by an incoming wave trying to get back in… I put my hand out to brace myself off the rocks and ended up sticking my palm into a Sea-Urchin… breaking off three spines in my hand.

‘Operated’ on myself when I got back to the beach and managed to get all the spines out without going completely Dexter Morgan on myself. (I’m making it sound more dramatic than it was)

Sunday the water was even more ferocious and the visibility wasn’t great. After getting seriously churned and pummeled by the waves I decided maybe this was a little bit too dangerous for a solo effort and headed back to the breach. Got rolled onto more or less the same rock as the day before… ha ha… this time picking up a cut on my leg… and coming down on hard on my coccyx (which is still smarting).

My elderly German Shepherd is unsympathetic to my ‘youthful’ exploits and/or injuries.

Hopefully this can become a regular weekend thing though. Despite my initial suckatude. I really have become far to sedentary of late and I really had fun. I’m also desperately wanting to get back on my bike… hopefully that will happen soon. I have people to impress with my tiny jumps and bunny hops.