Collection Report Feb 13-15, 2012

February 13, 2012. 2PM, an hour or so before high-tide. Yet another bright, sunny day. A very cold morning, so I left my collection bags at home, figuring everything would be iced hard to the ground. I figured wrong.

No ice here!

Oh well. I stuck around to survey the landscape. There had definitely been energy here, at least judging by the pebbles sculpted & blasted up onto the beach face. But...

Lake Placid?

...Where on earth was that energy? All the way out to the horizon, the sea surface on this day was as glazed and dead as it's been all winter.

The answer is fairly simple. The energy's been where it's been all winter, when it's been around at all. On the seafloor. The swash zone (where the high tide waves break and splash up the slope) was littered with shell, pebbles, gravel -- all heavy, dense seafloor debris.

What isn't typical about this week is one way that energy manifested itself on the 13th:

The artist at work

The ocean has cast up pebble mounds before. But always in even rows, spaced consistently down the beach. Never one massive headland of cobbles and pebbles sitting all on its own! Yet again, nature amazes.

At any rate, given the lack of bags on my person on the 13th, I came back on the 15th. About 9:45AM, an hour after low-tide. In one sense the view was the same:

This actually is a different pic from the first,
look at the tide!

In another sense it was quite different:

That's where the rock pile was two days before;
by the 15th, blown utterly out of existence

What a world. Anyway, the wracklines were about the same, and the finds among them seemed about the same. So with that prelude, on to them. Zone N:

52 finds:

• Building materials: 23 (20 asphalt, 2 tile, 1 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 13 (7 rope, 4 claw bands, 1 monofilament line, 1 trap vinyl coating scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 9 (seaglass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (plastic plug, tieback)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (fabric scraps)

Can't pretend there's much interesting here, except maybe the big haul of asphalt.

Down to Zone S:

63 finds:

• Building materials: 27 (7 brick, 20 asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 3
• Fishing misc.: 5 (3 rope - 1 v large, 2 monofilaments)
• Food-related plastics: 1 (bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 8 (7 sea glass, foil wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 8 (bandaid, plastic lumber, engine belt, 2 scraps >1", 3 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
• Paper/wood: 1
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric scraps, metal fencing)

The badly tortured plastic bottle still had its cap on, but scrapes on its underside had opened it & filled it with sand. Surely a long-suffering wash-in. As were the very grubby and frayed bits of rope (which I also found in Zone N above). The seaglass was a treat, as it's still rare to find more than one or two, no matter what the sea state.

So a varied week. Dead waves, yet heavy seafloor energy -- heavy enough to bring up asphalt, brick, glass, stone. Curiously, no tubeworm casings. Wherever in the surf zone these little homebuilders live, they escaped the week's fury. As did the densest/heaviest of plastics -- the vinyls. Only one, maybe two examples. The plastic that did wash in was limited to less dense varieties, oddly.

And again, no seaweed. Which is the bellwether. If energy strikes the seafloor where there's sea colander & kelp growing, it churns it up. Along with the plastics stuck amongst it. The two go hand in hand. This week, the energy didn't hit the seaweed zone.

Why does seafloor energy hit different parts of the seafloor in different weeks? The answer seems to be one of the keys in predicting where & how debris will wash in. Oh well. Live and learn.

Collection Report Jan 30, 2012

Monday, January 30, 11:30AM. Bay View beach, Saco, ME. Low tide. Blue skies, mild wind from the west to east, maybe gusts to 20 mph.

Another week of weak tides and no fresh seaweed washed in. But there -was- a wrack line, mostly made up of land-based plant matter. And noticeable bits of plastic in the mix.

What happened to all the fresh sand dumped onshore the week before? It all slumped down to the terrace -- a slow-motion mudslide.

Quicksand a foot deep,
literally mush underfoot

Clearly, the beach "knew" that this batch of fresh sand didn't belong. It didn't fit or mesh into the rest of the beach. Instead, the beach sloughed it off, and each tide eroded more of it back out to sea. Sometimes leaving depressions or bowls where the scour was the strongest.

More interesting from a flotsam aspect is that, this week, stuff was actually left behind -- or exposed by the erosion. Zone N:

65 finds:

• Building materials: 5 (4 asphalt, 1 brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 27
• Fishing misc.: 7 (rope, clawband, shotgun shell wadding, 4 trap vinyl coating scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 4 (2 bottlecaps, two tear-off tops)
• Food-related metal/glass: 5 (can bottom, 4 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 5 (rubberband, silk flower, PVC pipe scrap, 2 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 7
• Paper/wood: 3
• Misc./unique: 2 (tiny scrap of yarn, sharp metal offcut)

Crumpled up on the sand was a nice cautionary tale.

A receipt from Fayetteville, NCNY!
(many thx for heads-up on that)  

Obviously this didn't wash in; it came out of a very local pocket. A good reminder not to jump to conclusions about where something came from without good evidence. (See recent reports of Japanese tsunami debris already reaching US west coast.)

Zone S:

23 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (asphalt, brick)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12
• Fishing misc.: 2 (trap vinyl coating scraps)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (tiny scrap of can, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 3 (leather offcuts)

By the time I left, the winds had picked up. The dry wrackline was quickly blowing down to the terrace.

To be washed away.

Where will it wash up next? And what will wash up with it?

The Difference a Few Feet Makes

A couple weeks ago, I finished my main review of my first full year at Bay View. It was eye-opening.

Now, I've taken the time to compare the two zones I work. This has been even more eye-opening.

As a quick refresher, every week I walk two distinct zones at Bay View, I call them "Zone N"(orth) and "Zone S"(outh).

My two zones at Bay View

Each zone is 250 feet long, each starts at the dune line and goes down to the terrace, halfway between low & high tide lines. The big difference? Zone N is right near the parking lot & beach access. It's the popular spot, where all the beachgoers congregate. Zone S, on the other hand, sits beyond a private patio area that encroaches onto the beach. The patio acts like a line of demarcation. A few folks wander down past it to spend time in Zone S, but not many.

In Maine, beach season is pretty much only the summer, maybe a little in the spring. In autumn and especially winter, only the hardiest of solace-seekers hits a Maine beach. So my question when I started was, will there be a noticeable difference in debris between the zones, and will it even out over the winter when the beachgoers have gone?

Well, here's my charts for the four seasons:

Summer 2010

Autumn 2010

Winter 2010-11

Spring 2011

In the summer, the tourist season, Zone N blew Zone S away. This isn't surprising. And in fact, much of the difference between the two could easily be accounted for by beachgoer trash -- cigarettes, food packets, umbrella bits, toys, flipflops.

But look at autumn, winter, and spring. All of them still show a big difference between Zones N & S. In fact, 2 to 2 1/2 times more in Zone N for each season. What does this mean?

Breakdown of finds by zone & category

Well, maybe debris got buried in the summer, and re-exposed by winter storms? A dirtier Zone N in summer may mean more junk uncovered there in winter. But much of what showed up in winter had obviously washed in from far away. Tons of fishing debris, sun-bleached plastic, plastic fouled by marine life. And of course, no cigarette butts. If they'd been buried in summer, they surely would have shown up in winter.

No, what's happening here is weird. Two zones, same beach, same climate & weather, separated by barely 150 feet (if that). And yet during the winter, Zone N consistently doubles the amount of debris washed up.

Why?

There's a rock outcrop just north of Zone N that's exposed at low tide. Maybe it changes the current? The beach at Zone S seems slightly narrower, slightly steeper. Not drastically, but maybe enough? What about the trees? You can see from the satellite image that Zone N backs onto open ground, while Zone S is tree-studded. Does that blunt the seabreeze and change the flotsam?

Whatever the reason, I know this: If you think you know how your beach works, take the briefest of strolls up or down it. And then check again.

I love this stuff.

A Comprehensive Breakdown of Bay View's Debris, Year 1

My last collection report from Year 1, the June 7 report, is pending. But the numbers are tabulated and I wanted to get this published.

I can't quite believe that it's been a full year already at Bay View. I'm stunned both by what I've learned and how much there still is to learn. But I'm also very encouraged by the numbers that have been coming back. Some assumptions have been validated, others have been definitively blown apart. Most important, there are clear trends & compelling leads to follow, now that Year 2 has begun. And real points of discussion to bring to the wider flotsam-fighting world. I'm pretty chuffed.

So, details: From June 15, 2010 through June 7, 2011, I managed to collect at the beach 43 out of 52 weeks. (4 off-weeks were due to persistent foul weather, 2 due to being out of town, 3 due to overcommitments during the week.) All told, I picked up 8,456 individual pieces of manmade litter. It was quite a year.

Now, without further ado, the charts.

78-80% of the grand total consisted of some form of plastic

The number one culprit in terms of quantity over the full year was cigarette butts. The toxins in and persistence of these packets of plastic fiber are a subject of many Flotsam Diaries posts, as well as a three-part experiment. They will surely be the subject of future posts too.

After cigarette butts, the next largest litter source is nonfood/un-ID'd plastics. This is a catch-all category, as it includes things like beach umbrella bases, as well as tiny fragments & bag scraps that could have come from anything. Surprisingly, fishing gear beat out food-related plastics for third place. It's clear that the Gulf of Maine's fishing industry significantly contributes to the plastic pollution of the ocean & its coasts. What's less clear is what, if anything, can or should be done to mitigate. The industry is already one of the most regulated in the state & nation. A discussion for a later date.

Next in the list is food plastic & foam/styrofoam -- things most likely identifiable as local drops by beachgoers or, less often, from local garbage bins. Non-plastic items are a clear minority. Which only makes sense. Paper melts back to nothing; wood rots back to nothing; glass and steel settle to the seafloor and either erode or rust back to nothing. But plastic lives on and on.

---

Overall, these trends are fairly consistent with data found at such places as the Ocean Conservancy. But rather than one annual clean-up, The Flotsam Diaries is all about weekly cleanups. So I can take my data a step further, breaking down by season. And doing so shows some startling, and eye-opening, trends.

Summer's trend is cigarette-heavy

Over the summer, cigarette butts accounted for a full 2/5 of all the litter generated at Bay View! Saco has a no-smoking policy in its public parks, and the lifeguard station announced the beach as a "Tobacco-Free Area." But clearly the patrons weren't obeying.

Tied for distant second are food plastics and nonfood/unidentifiable plastics. The numbers of both are formidable each week at Bay View, but don't vie with cigarette waste. Fishing debris, near the bottom at 3%, may be misleading. Colorful pieces of rope, lobster trap tags, and buoy pieces can make unique souvenirs; much of that debris may have ended up going home with beachgoers.

Cooler weather brings a drop in cigarettes & food plastics

Good or fair weather remains for many weeks after Labor Day, and local beach debris still accumulates in the autumn. But cigarette & food plastic percentages show a significant drop. A late hurricane and later autumn storms cast a good deal of unidentifiable plastic upon the beach, as well as scattering asphalt chunks and wooden fence slats among the sands. (It remains to be seen if I'll keep including asphalt chunks in weekly totals. The material is so old & inert, it's become basically part of the rocky substrate to the beach. It's not clear if it aids or skews the record of what should be considered manmade debris.)

Winter turns debris counts on their heads

The winter record is what really surprised me. First, I had originally assumed that many of the cigarette butts were washing in. However, the winter signature shows that when beachgoers disappear at Bay View, cigarettes disappear. There is almost no recognizable cigarette waste washing into Zone N & Zone S at Bay View. It's local drops. The same is true of sytrofoam. Whatever happens to foam when it gets out on the ocean, it doesn't wash up in recognizable form at Bay View. What's there is local.

On the other hand, the % of fishing gear skyrocketed. Degraded rope, claw bands and trap tags, shredded bits of vinyl trap coating -- all washed up by the hundreds over the winter months. Do winter storms bring it in? Or does a lack of visitors mean that the colorful bits stay on the beach longer?

Also, un-ID'd/nonfood plastics washed up in amazing amounts. Many had been pulverized by wave action; many had marine organisms like bryozoans growing on them. Some may originally have been food-related, say tableware, but not identifiable anymore.

At any rate, the winter record shows the extent of plastics that now float in the Gulf of Maine. Some seemed to have been in the water for a very long time. Also, winter seems to be the time when the sea disgorges much of its battered debris back onto Bay View.

Spring brings its own mysteries

Springtime brought the least debris. Even after heavy storms & high winds, little washed in. This was true even of organics. Where there's seaweed, there's plastic; yet the big storms of early spring brought in little of either. Is there something about the coastal currents of early spring as fresh meltwater rushes out of rivers & mixes with the ocean? Worth a look.

Late in spring, the organics, with their plastic cargo, started returning. Also, foam & styrofoam started arriving in big #s. Probably the result of being blown out of local garbage bins, or careless early beachgoers; none of the foam showed signs of long-distance sea travel. A big % of the whole spring haul came from the last couple of weeks, the post-Memorial Day binge of beachgoing, with its attendant debris.

Overall, the ebb & flow of litter over the course of the year was quite remarkable. The amount of long-floating debris washed up from winter storms was shocking. The relative cleanliness of the beach/ocean for a few months afterward was also a surprise. And it provides an opportunity. A program of winter cleanups, when weather permits, may help do two major things: (1) Educate the public on the problem, as they will see that seaside pollution isn't all just local beachgoers & recent drops; (2) Possibly make a significant difference in the overall cleanliness of our coast & coastal waters, at least in the short term. Obviously the only true, sustainable answer is to stop polluting the ocean in the first place. But the more that organizations can bring the problem to light, the more willpower there should be to do something at the source.

This has been a remarkable year. I'm excited to have made these discoveries, and had a chance to bring them to the public. On June 20 I started my second year collecting & reporting on the litter that arrives at this small, quiet local beach. I'm already excited for June 2012, when I can compare Year 1 to Year 2.

Thanks to all for the support, advice, and ideas. It's been a lot of fun making new friends, learning new things, and trying to make a difference. Looking forward to keeping it up!

For those interested, below is the data, week-by-week, of what I collected from June 15, 2010 - June 7, 2011. Would love any & all thoughts.

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3

Collection Report May 20, 2011

After a week away in England, I hit the beach again on a gray, cold, drizzly Friday at the end of a gray, cold, drizzly week.

1:30PM, 50 degrees, about an hr before high tide

Wild times had happened while I had been away:

Which thing doesn't belong? Right, both things!

This log was one of 4 or 5 tree-sized pieces of flotsam that had rolled in. It lay just north of my Zone N, but was too alluring to leave be. So I wandered up and checked it out. En route, I saw a mass of plastic things washed up outside my usual zones. A couple examples:

1 of 3 bucket parts strewn over 250 yds

Bait bag, bottle, shotgun shell, etc.

Motor oil, w/cap brittle & sun-bleached

The more I walked, the more seaweed, plastic garbage, etc. Since I didn't have manpower or energy to collect the whole shore, I went back to my zones and got to work. Wet sand stuck to everything; it was tricky separating out flotsam. But I did my best. And in the end, I made a big haul. Zone N:

116 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (asphalt chunks)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 36
• Fishing misc.: 4 (shotgun shell, claw band, 2 craps of buoy)
• Food-related plastics: 18 (Powerbar, Pepsi, Lifesaver, and Life Water wrappers, 2 un-ID'd wrappers, Pringle's lid, straw, 3 bottle caps, coffee cup lid, degrading blue PS cup scrap, sandwich sauce/oil cup, 3 scraps, base of old-school 2-liter bottle)
• Food-related metal/glass: 6 (bottle, can, can scrap, 3 sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 37 (13 bits of bag/film, bucket rim, 2 shovels, screw cap, sunspray nozzle cap, "Ames True Temper" label, wristband, umbrella base, pen cap, ribbon, 4 scraps > 1", 10 scraps < 1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 11 (10 filters, 1 plastic wrap)
• Paper/wood: 2 (wood offcuts)
• Misc./unique: 0

Some local food-related drops from the week of May 7-14, which was supposedly warm & sunny. Shovels, sunspray, umbrella base probably from the same time. But some pretty interesting trends. No fishing rope, when that was the bulk of what was washing up in winter. 36 more pieces of foam, which seems to follow the spring styrofoam trend.

And then this.

Jagged chunk taken out of 2-liter bottle base

After conferring with the Plastic Pollution Coalition, marine biologist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, and Paul Sharp at Two Hands Project who have all seen their fair share of it, the consensus is that these are animal bites. Probably a bunch of bites over time, rather than one huge chomp. Whatever toxins are in this material -- or collected on its surface while it floated -- are now inside the food web. We might be eating some of this very bottle the next time we have a nice cod or haddock dinner. (Assuming of course that the plastic didn't rip apart and kill the animal(s) from the inside.)

It's not just a question of aesthetics when plastic floats in the water. It goes way, way beyond that.

On from there to Zone S:

47 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 18
• Fishing misc.: 3 (rope, gnarled trap scrap, lure)
• Food-related plastics: 5 (bottle cap, baggie, Nestle Pure Life label, degraded sauce/oil cup scrap, water bottle tear-off safety tag)
• Food-related metal/glass: 1 (sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 13 (5 bits of bag/film, spray bottle filler tube, Victorinox Swiss army knife package, linoleum scrap, 1 scrap > 1", 4 scraps < 1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 2 (plastic wrappers)
• Paper/wood: 1 (offcut)
• Misc./unique: 1 (small cloth scrap)

Again, much less in Zone S than Zone N, despite the wild weather and the huge amount that washed in farther north. Something about the beach here is vastly different from just 100 feet to the north. Other than that, not a lot of surprises here. It did feel good getting this particular emergency-room visit off the beach at least:

Ouch

And there we go. 163 more usual suspects, unusual suspects, and just plain head-shakers added to the ever-growing list.

Collection Report April 7, 2011

Welcome back to Bay View, Saco, Maine.

April 7, 2011, 9:10AM, 1 hr past low tide

"Welcome," I think?

Springtime!

Deadly algae aside, it was a beautiful, and odd, day. It had been another week of major storms, pounding surf, high seas. The beach slope had steepened noticeably. Big things had happened. Yet I found a grand total of 3 things floated in & beached.

This kelp is one of them

Storm, wave, wind -- nothing is bringing floatables into Saco Bay from the wider Gulf of Maine this spring. Compare that to the storms of Feb/March 2010 that got me started on this whole thing:

Ocean Park, Mar 19, 2010 - live clams & kelp

Back to the present, I've at least learned a key rule: Want to make the ocean laugh? Tell yourself that you know how it works. Prime example from April 7, 2011:

Zone S, the southern, more narrow area of beach

Now that's just weird. No kelp. No seaweed. No seashells. No plastic. Just tens of thousands of rocks & cobbles, neatly assembled into mounds. The northern stretch, Zone N, had lots of strewn rocks. But nothing like down here at Zone S, just 100 feet away. Massive, organized energy had to hit this stretch of beach to do this. And as I alluded in my last post, that energy isn't uniform. It crests & troughs up and down the shore. It's the same energy that carves out Bay View's sandy cusps. This time, it got a little more intense. (Oddly enough, these neat piles of rock didn't square up one-to-one with the cusps above them. Each tide seems to have its own frequency -- its own pattern.)

So, on to the collection. Zone N:

31 finds:

• Building materials: 20 (15 chunks of asphalt, 3 brick pieces, wooden block, tile with rubberized backing)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 2 (styrofoam scrap, blue sticky-back foam shape)
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 1 (chewing gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (bottle cap, seaglass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 0
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4 (all recently smoked)
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (leather shoe sole, scrap of rubberized soundproofing/watershield)

And next, Zone S:

61 finds:

• Building materials: 57 (40 asphalt chunks, 15 brick pieces, worn flowerpot base scrap, fence post)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 0
• Fishing misc.: 0
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 2 (seaglass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 1 (tennis ball)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 1

By any angle, this blows the roof off of 10 months of trends. Only the shoe sole floated in. Everything else was local. Even the asphalt & brick. I don't think it was recently dredged up deep at sea. If it had been, the shore would be littered with clams, mussels, snails -- seafloor stuff. My hunch? It's material that's collected over the years down at the low-tide terrace, and is usually buried lightly by sandy outwash. This week, the storms blew away the sand, and blasted the rocks up the slope. In Zone N they scattered willy-nilly. In Zone S, they massed together into little islands. Same beach, same weather, two totally different worlds.

Zone N, low-tide terrace

I love this stuff.

Collection Report Dec 1-2, 2010

Welcome back to Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. December 1 was mild, mid-40s, but blustery. (In fact, a gust clocked at 41 mph.) Gray clouds were gathering, so I snuck in before the rains -- and the next high tide.

The flats at low tide

Remember the two tide lines & the berm of just one week before? All that stuff I thought I was figuring out about how the contour of the beach was changing? Well, do you see any of that in the picture below?

Me neither

Clearly I have a lot to learn about how wind & tide, current & rain really behave. Here's one thing I did discover. The winds buffeting me on Dec. 1 were largely from the SE; they were blowing in, fiercely at times, off the ocean. Pushing the tide unnaturally high, and blasting the heck out of the prior week's landscape.

At first I thought this meant another bumper crop of debris, fishing rope, boats, you name it. But it wasn't to be. Bay View had been assaulted by forces that can bury 3 feet of fishing rope without a thought.

What do you mean three feet?

Oh, that's what you mean.

It was dumb luck that I found that bit of rope. Most anything else? Blown away or buried deep. In the end, my trash bags were very light.

On December 2, I decided to take another quick swing by. The lay of the land looked much the same. The wind had raised foot-high sand drifts in places. And did other weird things.

Sand blows, but leaf doesn't blow?

When I spotted this leaf, I knew this week's collection would be hopeless. A light, dry leaf didn't blow away, but the sand did blow across and nearly cover it. WTH?

A short walk up Zones N & S proved I was right. Very little debris to be found. Not that it wasn't there, just that it couldn't be seen.

So, a collection of Zone N:

37 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (2 fence slats, 1 chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6 (inc. a piece from the boat insulation)
• Fishing misc.: 8 (7 scraps of rope, 1 claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle caps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (aluminum can, can scrap, 2 bits of sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 11 (3 scraps of packaging, 2 bits of grocery bags, 3 hard plastic scraps, 1 scrap of boundary tape, 1 tiny bit of balloon, 1 sm. red hard plastic bit)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (scrap of fabric, freshly-lost tennis ball (dog toy?))

A bunch of usual suspects. Though, to be honest, 37 is more than I thought I'd collected. It doesn't take long to add up.

On to Zone S:

18 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (fence slat, chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 4 (shotgun shell wadding, 2 bits of rope, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (bag scrap, green soldier, tampon applicator, bandaid, tie-band, clear scrap, green scrap, yellow scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Quick closeup of the small, but delightfully varied, non-food plastics:

Would be OK not finding another tampon applicator

So this week, I was well & truly schooled. Nov. 24-25 had put assumptions in my head that didn't last seven days. Which just proves that it might be a bit early for me to be making assumptions. Still, every idea that we get wrong gets us one step closer to getting it right.

Besides, I like a world that's full of surprises.