Mussels and anemones and barnacles abound. The colors in this are compelling.  I love the green of the anemone interior and the orange rocks.  The jetty is one of my favorite places on the beach.

Before the storm, awaiting welcome rain.

Like a searchlight beam.  Theatrical.  Almost artificial.  But there it was!

A privilege it is, to be on the beach nearly every day.

Beans and potatoes.  Well,  just stones, really, but aren’t they something?  They’re almost crunchy, and they rattle rambunctiously when the waves pull out across them just right. I wonder how they’d change, over, say, ten cycles of waves.  One of these times, I’ll do multiple photos of the same area of rocks.  Stones.  They seem more like stones than rocks.  Stones are rounded off.  Rocks are — rocky?  Words and images.  I love them both.  Beans and potatoes.

Now you don’t.  There are these lovely hole-y rocks that are submerged or exposed, depending on the tides.  The beach grows and shrinks; the rocks appear and vanish; the moon waxes and wanes.  As does my power with words and images.  When these rocks appear as if out of nowhere, though, I do think about the forces of time, and change, and variation.  It’s all different and it’s all the same.

Someone tied these together rather neatly, or so it seems.  Quite striking, even if a human construction.  The shadow, too.

Shadows.  Or so it seems…

Pale and pretty clusters.  Different from yesterday’s.  It’s nice where the desert meets the ocean…meets the eye… meets the camera… meets the blog!

Today we walked by the lagoon because it was supposed to rain at low tide.  The rain was late, but spring isn’t!

On our walk we met a  couple with a ruby  Cavalier.  I stop anyone I see with a Cavalier.  So we chatted a while and then each of us went on.  Fifteen minutes later we ran into each other again, laughed, and decided to have lunch together at a nearby place where we were heading anyway.  He grew up in the Boston area, we were all in high tech in Silicon Valley, our kids are comparable ages, and they live in the next development across the street!  We are going to see the Alan Turing movie together tomorrow and having supper afterwards.  Spring.  New friends.  Good.

The strangest things get washed up on the beach, or perhaps washed down?  This was sitting there, just like this.  From a distance I thought it was an unfamiliar kind of kelp — hah!  Further down the beach there was a smaller piece, all entangled with real kelp.  But the shape of this one was too irresistible. [I had to type that last word three times, getting its syllables and -ible right!  It’s fun to make editorial comments late at night…]

Of stones.  I thought ten, but perhaps it is eleven.   All lined up by the moving water, with those lovely sand patterns making a complimentary (and complementary?) background. You can even see a reflection on the thin layer of water.  This was very low tide and the beach was big, on a gray and cool day, perfect for walking.  And looking.

Perhaps I’m just easily amused…this beehive cluster all mounded up looks like a great demonstration of species success.  I also appreciate that the stones and the black mussels are similar in shape to these white barnacles — which also resemble a pine cone!

Then I like the river of rounded-off stones, and the contrast of the warm greenish tan big rock at the bottom and the cool bluish gray one at the top.  I wonder what else is lurking there that I just don’t notice.

Five minutes before, the sea lions were basking in the sun on the jetty.  So were we.  We had left the jetty and walked about a hundred yards, back towards our beach stairway  — and this is what the view looked like.  We turned around and couldn’t even see the jetty any more!

The temperature dropped about five degrees and people started packing up their sunshades.  It was a fairly busy scene during this holiday weekend, and had been about 72, as perfect as possible.  I happen to think 67 and foggy is just as perfect, but that’s me…

And the light on the red branches draws the eye, as does the deep black shadow.  I like the juxtaposition of living and inanimate, of line and mass, of deep space and shallow.  The cliffs keep showing me new things.

This photo is turned sideways — and I like it better that way.  Those rocks are coming out to confront you.

Get your ducks lined up.  Is that a hunting term?  (Then you can get two birds with one shot?  or?)

Get your stones lined up.  Get yourself lined up.  For what?  I think lines are a necessary.  Necessary evil?  Dunno, but sure necessary.  I like grids, too.  And Agnes Martin’s lines.  And Sol LeWitt’s.  And Cy Twombly’s.  But I would, wouldn’t I, now?

Angles, textures, colors, shapes, lines, edges, shadows. It’s all there.   It’s all happening   At the zoo.  No, I mean at the beach.

Kelp blade, attached to pod.  Aren’t those veins/ridges a nice parallel to lines in the sand and to wave forms?

I imagine there are kelp specialists.   I am just finishing a book about a [fictional] moss expert.  Kelp seems weird compared to moss, but weirdness is pretty subjective, eh?

And it bears a slight resemblance to a bird.  With a teensy head and a voluminous body.  I am imagining printing with this — running an inked roller over it, then pressing it onto some nice handmade paper.  Yes.

Washed up onto the beaches, these things are everywhere.  And when the light hits them just right, they lose their tangled decomposing strangeness and become things of great beauty.

They fill with air and hold up the “leaves” (technically, blades) at the surface so they can gather light.  Functional and evocative.   I like the ridging pattern in the blades, too.  Another photo later, perhaps.

Kelp is a very ancient algae (many millions of years old) that is useful in thickening foods, cosmetics, and toothpaste.   You can check it out on Wikipedia. This blog  is more about the intersection of useful and gorgeous!

Well, no, of course not.  Beachscape or sandscape.  But really.  These almost-sunset photos have such nice shadows.  And aren’t the craters neat?

The word processor doesn’t like ‘beachscape’ or ‘sandscape.’  Too bad, so sad.  It doesn’t like them hyphenated either.  But what else would you call them?  Bah!

Aren’t the shadows and the angles and the light and the textures and the layers cool?

And aren’t there nights when you want to be all tucked in and have your mother sing you a lullaby?  I do not have a wonderful singing voice, but I sang to my children at bedtime.  Sometimes I sing to myself at bedtime.  I wish for the world that all children be warm and dry and sleep with love, freedom from fear, and full tummies — all tucked in.

It’s sitting there, just like that, waiting for me.  Well, no, of course not, but sometimes it feels like that.  Maybe I should turn the photo on its side?  Dunno.  I just really like the white shell wedged in there.  Where shall I live?  Oh, here looks pretty good.  Says the shell.  Then again, I say it, too, about living here.   Thank you.

They look monumental.  They are crumbling and crenelated and etched and eroded and magnificent.  Tomorrow they will probably look just a little bit different.

Today is our son’s 22nd birthday, and 22 years ago, everything looked just a little bit different.  It was a wonderful day!

For me, this sort of day is more magical than a sunny one.   It was even cold enough that on our walk I was wishing for a hat that covered my ears.  But the cold just comes naturally with this steely yet tactile-surfaced water that seems like crinkled aluminum foil.  The sun is almost moon-ishly pale and calm.  The world is getting ready for something.  I hope it is something better.

Thursday, and the campground is filling up.  We play ‘that-would-be-a-good-RV-to-live-in’ and decide that it would be best to have one that you drive rather than tow, and that you could just tow a car.  Then you’d have the best of both worlds — you could ride together in the RV and still have the independence of a car to tootle around in when you arrive at your destination.  We’ve never seen the inside of one of these things, not one, so we haven’t the faintest idea what we’re talking about, which perhaps makes it even more fun?

The sign of spring I mentioned earlier.  There’s really nothing to call winter here, and spring follows so rapidly on the heels of fall that there’s barely a blurred line between them.  Yes, the nights and days are cooler starting sometime in October, but there are only a few weeks or so when it’s too cool to eat lunch outdoors, sweater or no.

And ‘winter’ on the beach is so glorious, with few people, crisp air, and mostly sunny days.  The horizons are more subtle, there’s sometimes fog, and the gray days just accent the sunny ones even more.  I enjoy these times in which we needn’t turn on heat nor air conditioning.  It gets up to 72 or 73 during the day upstairs; by bedtime, the open windows have brought in the 65-degree air and it is comfortable to sleep.

Have I said I don’t miss the ‘seasons?’  I don’t.  They are more subtle here and I don’t miss the extremes at all.  I can drive to the mountains or the desert if I wish.  The train just went by, behind the houses across the street.  The industrialized world to the east of the house, the glories of nature’s ocean to the west…

These will never lose their wonder for me. I probably have taken dozens of photos, and could take dozens more every day.  There was another new shrub in bloom today, but I’ll save its flower portrait for another time.

Had I not had a different and earlier inspiration for invented calligraphy and glyphs, these would probably have been just as effective as catalysts.  Or maybe I’d be drawing branches/trees all the time?  The very first drawing I made that gave me great pleasure — in both the making and the result — was of birch trees.  Sixth grade.  Laconia, NH.  We sat outside to draw.  It was a charcoal drawing on white textured watercolor paper.  I wish I still had it.  I can convince myself I remember its details.

Funny how I didn’t get the hint.  Or maybe I got it and stubbornly, defiantly ignored it?  I was never praised for artistic talent, or even recognized for it, and not encouraged in any way.  I didn’t have or make opportunities to express or develop it.  I do recall noticing it in others.  I certainly had more appreciation than skill.  Could still use more skill.  More practice.  Some people, though, have the gift of rendering.  The rest of us have to acquire it through lots of perspiration and frustration.  My sister said “Dammit, hands!  Do as I tell you!” regarding learning to play the piano.  I could say the same thing about drawing.  And I also think that there’s a difficulty with my eyes instructing my brain instructing my hands…

The waves don’t have these concerns.

But that orange-y brown makes them seem more like autumn.  I don’t recall seeing this variety last year.  They are very perky.  I have to keep myself from picking them.  Don’t think I’m allowed.

“Perky orange-y brown but yellow spring autumn-looking flowers.”  It is unlikely that that phrase (not quite a sentence) has ever appeared before in the English language.  Isn’t language, and syntax especially, quite marvelous?

Today’s ocean blog, brought to you by Carlsbad flowers and linguistics.  Thank you.

There were several worthy beach compositions today, but this graceful grass draped so casually over the rock, along with those locally characteristic sand markings, really stopped me.  The wet sheen on the stones is always beautiful and there was also a striking brightness to the sun’s markings on the water.  But I’ll save that for another day.