Last Saturday Nancy and I packed up and headed off to Birmingham. On Sunday we drove to Florida with Mark, Jenny, Jackson (8), John Michael (6), and Margaret (2) to spend a week on the white sands of Rosemary Beach. From my point of view things didn't get off to a good start.

It didn't take long before I realized that I left our computer turned on at the house. Since we didn't leave a key with any of our neighbors, it looked like it was going to have to stay on the entire week. The only down side of that was email. Our home computer would pull down our email from our providers, and we would not be able to read it in Florida. That's probably not an issue except we've signed up for paperless billing from just about everybody. I don't like being late paying our bills! So what to do?

I came up with the solution Sunday morning. I called our neighbor Rick, gave him the code to enter our garage, and had him flip the circuit breaker to the computer room. The computer stayed off when he put the circuit breaker back on, and all was well. Within a minute Nancy got an email, and I was able to call Rick back and tell him we had success.

Now back to the beach and the shark that joined us there on Wednesday. Yes, I said a shark! Jackson and I were out about 40 yards playing in the surf when I spotted it swimming toward the shore about 30 yards further out and just to the right of us. I grabbed Jackson and headed to shore as fast as I could go. I couldn't stand up when we got there. It's been some time since I moved that fast. We spent the next 20 minutes or so looking for it, but it apparently moved on. Some young guy a little further down from us also saw it. It came back about an hour later.

This time Jenny was playing in the surf with both Jackson and John Michael, again about 40 yards out. We saw the shark to our left. Mark called to Jenny to move to the right and come in. The shark swam around her and was next seen to her right. It came straight into the shore and swam between Jenny and Mark who was still yelling instructions from the shore. It wasn't more than 6 or 7 yards from Mark, but he was standing on the beach. The guys next to us, who were in the water right in the path of the shark, started splashing and yelling. The shark, which was about 4 to 5 feet in length, turned tail and ran. That was the last we saw of it.

That's pretty much all the excitement we needed for the week. The rest of the time was very relaxing. Wonderful weather. Good food. And a couple of good ebooks. Check out the pictures but don't envy us too much. Tomorrow we head back to Huntsville.