Pensacola Beach, Takes a Lickin'

Well this past Saturday P-cola Beach was still kickin', but yesterday (Wednesday) it took quite a lickin'. A BUNCH of oil washed ashore Wednesday morning. Crews have been out cleaning it up, but it looks like our white sand beaches might be a thing of yesterday :( Its disheartening.

No, my friends, that is NOT Stingrays this time (see post below)...that is OIL! :(

Pensacola Beach, Still Kickin'

Yesterday we went out to the beach. Each time we go we try to live it up because we aren't sure if it is gonna be "beachable" (like that word?! I made it up in case you couldn't tell! Ha!) for much longer. Yesterday was absolutely beautiful so I had to break the camera out to capture the scene. I couple of weeks ago we went and saw some tar balls on the beach, but it could not have been more clean or beautiful yesterday. The water was calm and clear...so much so that EVEN I got in and enjoyed it (that doesn't happen too too often). So, so far, P-cola Beach is still alive and kickin'!

The Beach Scene (at an area between P-Cola Beach and Navarre, its our special secret spot because it is not as crowded and still has a bathroom for Garin)

The love of my life. Being a nerd and getting his study on. Man, I love the Beach!

No, those are not tar balls floating in the water. They are STINGRAYS! Groups of about 10 of them kept swimming by where we were sitting and I followed them up the beach and found a BIG OL group of them...there had to be like 100 or so. And they were soooo close, as you can see. I was standing right on the shore line taking these pictures. Garin tried to go swim with them when they came by us one time...but they just veered around him (we paid good money to swim with the stingrays when we were in the Grand Caymans, so we were excited to get the adventure for free! Except these didn't want to play like the ones in the Caymans did...guess we should bring some fishes with us next time!). Garin also saw a sea turtle (and I "saw" it too...well I saw a moving black spot...but I couldn't get over to it fast enough to see what it was...I'll trust Garin that it was a sea turtle).

Tried to get a close up...but it was so bright I couldn't see what I was taking a picture of. You can kind of see that its a stingray down there.

Congrats to Lieutenant JG Kirkpatrick

This past week Garin got a promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade. This is a pretty standard promotion for CG officers after serving for a year in half, but it comes with a nice pay raise none-the-less. On Thursday Garin had a small promotion ceremony where his insignia (shoulder bars in this case) were changed from those of an Ensign to those of a LTJG. For some reason they let the wives do the "pinning" if they so chose, so I got to do Garin's. I dropped one of them in the process...I'm not sure why, but I was pretty nervous (I was the only wife there...or family member for that matter)! Congrats Garin, you make your wife proud :)

Reaffirming the Oath of Office

Getting his new LTJG Shoulder Boards

They MADE him kiss me ;)

Us :)