Sea Faring Sheep and Goats
What with the exploding of the shuttle and seven school children buried under a back country avalanche in British Columbia and all this weekend, both Chinese New Year and Groundhog Day scooted by with very little fanfare.
Groundhogs are apt to scoot by with little fan fare anyway, but I thought the Chinese New Year should be marked in some way. So yesterday, I looked it up on the web. Depending on which source you're examining, it is either the Year of the Black Water Sheep or the Year of the Water Goat. Scrolling through the goat/sheep description here, one thing caught my eye and hooked my imagination:
"Careers suited to Sheep are Acting, Gardening and Beach Combing."
Beach Combing! O... no career counsellor ever advised me that that was an option for me. How Come? What a spectacular thing that would be... roaming the beach, crabs scuttling to and fro, examining tide drenched debris and driftwood. Someone, somewhere must offer a degree in beach combing. They probably have a fancier title for it: Seaside Excavation, Shoreline Archaeology and Exploration.
But surely there would be workshops detailing the proper way to spackle odd bits of driftwood with sequins, googley eyes and tufts of lucky troll hair and foist them on the beach going public. Surely there must be texts on how to coax decaying crustacean corpses out of their shells and achieve the perfect sun bleached patina, books titled "Seashells for Dummies" and "1001 Uses for Sea Kelp." And exciting lectures about sandcastles and mythic sea gods and the barnacled boats of yore. Perhaps I could do my thesis on Sponge Bob Squarepants and Patrick. So many possibilities, my head is swimming.
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