To boldly split infinitives

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I have tried my best not to get too excited about it.

Ever since I heard about this new Star Trek movie, I've been telling myself, "They're gonna mess it up. It will be another one of those typical summer-blockbuster mentality movies: All whiz-bang and no substance."

Well, I've been nurturing a some nerds of my own for the last 10 years in preparation for the movie event of their generation. And whaddya know? This one's it!

From the opening scene to the closing words and those familiar chords that tug any self-respecting nerd's heartstrings, it was a real winner of a Star Trek movie, despite what some other hard cores are saying, and despite it being the 11th movie in the series of Star Trek - breaking the odd-numbered movie curse.

Rachael leaned against me for the entire movie, gripping my hand during the intense moments and uttering squeals of delight for the Trekkie humor. Her review of the movie was obvious to me even before it was over: "Daddy, that movie was AWESOME!"

Rare find

On Monday I took the girls to Virginia Beach to look for seashells. Since it was in the low fifties with a chance of rain all day, I made a weak attempt to talk them out of it.

"Girls, it's going to feel very cold at the beach today. Are you sure you want to go?"

"Yes daddy. If we go to the beach before it's hot, we might find some really good seashells before everyone else goes down there and gets them all."

"Ok. Let's go."

As I suspected, the wind was indeed chilling, but we took off our shoes and went walking in the sand anyway. And really, we were having so much fun that we didn't mind the cold.

Julia must have yelled out my name a dozen times: "Daddy! Look what I found!" as she would show me another half-broken shell. But I would always respond with a reassuring, "Oooh! What a pretty shell!"

Then she called out my name again.

Almost absent mindedly I gave her the reasurring words that were now almost automatic, until I saw what she had:



Wow. A seahorse. And a big one at that. Now that's a rare find, indeed!