15

 November is about to pass, and I realize now that I've officially been on Blogger for 15 years as of this month.   My early few months were mostly blogs about coming to Long Beach with the girls after being misdiagnosed with kidney cancer, and leaving our home in Florida at the end of August, 2005, a few days earlier than planed because, well, because HURICANE KATRINA.

Here's the first of the videos I started making at that time, which begins halfway through the trip (Starting, ironically, in New Mexico the day after Katrina made landfall) and continuing through the first few months of our life in Long Beach:

Back then my screen name was still TempestSpell and I had just started to learn more about what would later become one of my great loves in life.

Sometime during that time I started going down to the tide pools and learning about nudibranchs, and by November had asked readers to write a poem about nudibranchs. No one did. So I got a little silly and penned this:

Oh! diverse and colorful denizens of the sea,
order Nudibranchia sub orders have you four in all
Arminacea, Dendronotacea, Aeolidacea, Doridacea
With great beauties, Hopkins Rose and Spanish Shawl
Of all sea creatures wondrous and fair
From radula to gill to foot,
In interest far beyond compare.

Oh! favored among the opisthobranchs,
You many forms I do admire
You’ve made your mark though you don’t ink
Like aplysia californica in ire
Your dorids lovely with rinophores
Complex and gills like fragile flowers,
Your aeolids have armed their cerata with
Nematocyst from cnidaria devoured!

Oh, Nudibranch soft shelless ones!
Beyond e’en Cupid’s your lovers’ ways
Simultaneous hermaphrodites who engage
In reciprocal copulation which lasts for days
Two faithful lovers side by side
Unlike aplysia californica’s lovers’ chain.
Your million children borne on the tide
planktonic larva moved where the oceans deign.

It's been a long time since then, and a lot has changed, and a lot has changed and changed back, and a lot hasn't changed at all.  I wouldn't have written that poem today (for sure!)  but I still love the ocean, especially the rocky shore and the tide pools.  I've been to the desert and back again, and while I did love my life out in Santa Fe, I love being near the salt shore even more.   Perhaps tomorrow I will go on a whale watch.  It's almost Grey Whale season.  I likely won't write a poem about it, but I will likely look back on this here in 15 more years and wonder what the heck I was thinking back then.