After getting settled Friday, we are having a wonderful time at Laguna Beach in Florida, beginning the first day of a week long of festivities during the Feast of Tabernacles celebration.  We have a spacious beach side cottage and are enjoying the laid back atmosphere and ability to loose track of time...NO SCHEDULE.  Everyone is arriving today so we'll be following an order of services and fellowship for the week, but with plenty of down time alloted for family.  The beaches here are gorgeous!!  I've been to many beaches and several in Florida, especially South Florida where my mom lives part of the year and by far this beach is the prettiest I've seen.  Course every beach has it's own distinct appeal, but this one is the closest I've seen to the Carribean water.  Clear blue, white sand and no debris or sea weed.  We spent most of the day yesterday swimming and critter catching.  Kids have been hermit crab catching and collecting some really interesting shells.  We hope to make it to Shell Island later in the week for some extra adventures. 

View from our deck.

The Panhandle beaches...this day was calm and clear.

Little gull kept paying me a visit...so had to get it's picture.  :)

Joe would go out for runs in the morning and report back the fun things he saw.  Course we had to join him for scouting at times.  We didn't get a photo of the dolphins which were a real treat to see!

Lilly and daddy...and their footprints.

What a shame that crabs are among the "unclean" foods that God said to abstain from eating.  Living up north I had my fair share of lobster, clams, crab, etc. with no knowledge that they were on the refrain from eating list in the Bible.  Science has been proving what the Bible has said all along when it comes to these "unclean" items.  A great book on the subject called "What the Bible Says About Healthy Living", by Dr. Rex Russell, MD provides scientific evidence on this subject.  "Crabs and other shellfish are considered scavangers of the ocean and help to filter toxins from the water.  "Many illnesses including instant paralysis, devistate some people every day as a result of eating shellfish", according to the book.  They can be placed in a body of water that is contaminated wih cholera bacteria and they will purify the water.  Shrimp, oysters, crab, scallops and mussels are particularly efficient at this.  They filter large volumes of water everyday.  Sewage laden with chemicals, toxins and harmful bacteria, parasites and viruses become concentrated in those shellfish".  YUM!!  Even the state of California proposed a law requiring the food industry to label shellfish with a message warning, "This food may be dangerous to your health".  So, as you can see eating unclean is a sort of Russian roulette game, defiling our temples as God warned.  Below is a list of clean foods according to the Bible.  I can't list all of the scientific evidence supporting this, but I would suggest people do their research on it.

Clean

calf, deer, goat, ox, sheep, goose, chicken, duck, pigeon, quail, swan, turkey, black bass, black drum, bluefish, carp, channel bass, chub, cod, croaker, flounder, flying fish, goldfish, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, kingfish, mullet, pike, pompano, porgy, rainbow trout, rock bass, salmon, sea bass, shad, smelt, spanish mackerel, spot, sturgeon, tuna, white perch, carolina whiting, yellow perch, crickets, grasshoppers, locust.

All other foods you can assume are unclean.  Interestingly, when the Egyptians ignored these food laws they came down with horrible plagues.  The Isrealites who obeyed the laws were spared and enjoyed good health.  Our family has been observing the food laws for about 5 years now consistantly.  We figure to have good health in this horribly toxic world the Biblical laws are an easy fix, as we really were not regular pork, shellfish/catfish, etc. eaters.  The harder aspects to control in this life are the man-made toxins in food such as transfats, msg, artificial colors/flavors, etc.  Not to mention the stripping of nutritients during processing.