Perhaps more like lavender, but I do like alliteration.  This is the season for desert bloom, and here where the ocean meets the desert, it’s all a-blooming.  Daisies and poppies and statice and ice plant; pines and magnolias too; roses and geraniums, pansies and bird-of-paradise; violets and morning glories of blue.

So.  Spring.  Celebrate!

Like the soap I remember from 30-40 years ago.  From Chinatown.  Delightful scent.   (And beautiful wrapping!) This bee was flitting from bloom to bloom.  Tricky to capture with camera.  Its rear end looks like the center of the flower!

Ah Google!  It still exists.  Can buy it online!

In the late afternoon sun, they curl around themselves into ruffled brightness.  I think they’re actually more arresting in these rolled shapes than when they are fully open.  And stunning against that deep, dark, black-tinged green.

A lot earlier to bloom than last year, and gigantic.  Aren’t the shadows and the delicate shading of the color rather amazing?  I walk and look and walk and look and wonder whether I’ll find something new, and then realize old=new=always different anyway.  A good thing.

I brushed by this on my walk today and now I know why the pollen count is up.  This must be a variety of pine; it produced yellow clouds when disturbed.  It’s pretty stuff, but I decided not to put my face in it!  There sure is a ton of it and you can see how thickly it’s populated by the pollen — there’s almost as much yellow as green.

Found on the beach.  Well, not quite ON.  Near.  At the foot of the stairs.  This stuff was used to block off a dangerous stairway.  Because the rocks and stones and sand have moved so much these past few months, the bottom steps of many of the stairways have just ended, in space,  over three feet above the sand.  A rather large jump, and not safe for many peeps.

Yet somehow this red stuff reminded me of kelp tangles.  I mean, kelp looks pretty off-planet.  This bright tangle does, too! Isn’t it a beautiful shade of red-orange?

I wasn’t even sure where the horizon was.  You can tell these gray mornings are a special to me.  The tide was high and roaring, with the stones rattling mightily on the outflow.  The sand comes and goes; the stones come and go; the tide just keeps on coming.

The sun comes out in the afternoon, as if to say, “See?  I was just hiding for a bit…”

Something about red and white, isn’t there?  The green doesn’t hurt, either.

I was in, and at, a photo show today.  A photo I took for the blog was juried in.  Fun!  (See December 9,  2015; the version in the show was printed at 16″ x 12″)

From the plant to the basket to the truck to the grocer to my fridge to my counter top — to you.  I’ve never seen one before — have you?

Don’t know the tree, don’t know the pods.  It almost looks like a berry.  There are other pods, but they are brown, not red.  I’ll keep checking this tree and see what develops.

How close — and out of focus — can you get and still know what it is?

It’s a volunteer in a pot that has a rosebush in it.  There are also volunteer petunias.  Both are doing better than the rosebush.  Roses need much more sun than our back yard gets, so we have these very leggy plants.  I keep threatening to pull them up, but then they bloom and I can’t.  I didn’t plant them.  I want to replace them with hydrangea, much more suited to our shaded raised bed.  Maybe.  Sometime.  But not now.

Sometimes the picture is enough.

And all those shades of green.  I was going to try to remove the diagonal branch sitting entwined in the flowers and then thought better of it.  Yes, it’s better with it there.  Gives the image some structure and support.  Plus diagonals are always activating elements in a composition , so they say.  Yep, they do.  And those skinny delicate twigs contrast nicely with the big strong stalk.  I think.  Purple and chartreuse are really gorgeous.  I think I’ve said that before.

Try saying that three times fast.  The light — and shadows — are what called to me.  Nearly monochromatic, yet the grays and browns seem rich.  Even the dirt behind has an appealing texture.

There are many gnarled trunks like this in our area.  I don’t know what kind of tree it is, other than mighty pretty.

Red and pink and yellow and purple and magenta and white — with green and brown.  A companion to yesterday’s flower, up close and personal.

At least, I think it is.  New.  Aren’t those clusters of not-yet-blossoms unusual?  The flowers don’t droop, but the buds do.  As if they gain strength from their own blooming.  Perhaps that’s often true — coming into your own makes you more-so.  It’s a culmination, a gathering, a reconsideration, a fearless acceptance of essence.  Well, if not fearless, a this-is-it, despite the risks.

This-is-it.

With a bit of fauna-product.  Sometimes I like to collect the relationships between inside and outside, between obvious and hidden, between abstract and concrete…

Who’da thought a salad could be so — photogenic?  No processing on the photo itself.  And we ate it all up: lettuces, parsley, red bell pepper, cucumber, feta, and home-made low-fat 5-ingredient salad dressing.

So much for an ocean blog.  I considered renaming it to “Whatever caught my eye today.”  But you’ve probably figured that out anyway.

That’s what my mom said I called them.  I know someone explained to me that dandelions were weeds, but really…aren’t they the first flower a child picks?  In areas where grass grows, anyway.

These darlings were in someone’s front yard border, so cheerful in their shy but not-shy way.  I love the velvety colors; gold and yellow and purple and deep blue and that clean, stark white, all against the mysterious dark greens.  Even planted nature can outdo itself!

Deserted beach.  Warm, balmy.  Where is everyone? Around 5 pm…There were people in the campground, and that usually means people on the beach.  But not today.  The tide was rather in-ish, and the rocks are leaving fewer areas of comfortable sand, but no one was even out there walking.  Sure is pretty, though.

Credit where it’s due:  I missed this on my walk; Richard took the photo!

I love the crack and the white icing and the small leafy growth at the tips and the huge expanse of stones.  Our sandy beach is buried — under water or under these stones.  Either way, it’s tough walking, but look at the treasure to be found by those who persevere…

Once you start looking for them, they are everywhere.  And not a poppy, either.  At least, its leaves don’t look like poppy leaves.  More like geranium of some sort?

It poured on and off, and even hailed and thundered today.  Hail.  At 8 am.  Wonder what that does to these flowers.  And the unsuspecting folks who leave their cars outdoors.  Hail.  It was warm and nearly 80 a week or two ago.  Today the high was under 60.

Strange weather and beautiful flowers.

Different beach, different rock,  Not part of a cliff face, just a big boulder brought in for erosion control (?)

Gorgeous: the fissures and cracks and lines and scratches and the rust with the burgundy and grayish purple and the white just making it all a bit more so.  The bit of aqua and smudges of black don’t hurt either.  It would be a lovely color scheme for a room or an outfit.

Nature does it best.

Six California poppies.  Spring has sprung for sure.  They are impossibly orange-y gold, aren’t they?

It rained today, too.  It will some more for the next two days.  Good for us and for poppies too.  I get to wear my black and blue polka-dot rain boots from Kansas.  Can’t imagine they sell those around here!

And it’s really fun to use the word “harbinger.”  Probably never typed it before.

A bit giddy with California golden poppies.  ‘t’s okay, yes?

Two colors, living in harmony, no race riots.  If only.

And of course, down the road a ways, there were black-eyed daisies, and all-purple ones, and all-white ones.  All doing just fine.  If only.

Aren’t these cool colors just serene?  The beach doesn’t have to be golden and warm to be wonderful.  I love the moodiness, the green-gray water, the charcoal grays of the stones, and how the black and gray colors modulate out from darker to paler.  You can almost see the contour lines on a map…and that indistinct horizon that beckons and challenges simultaneously, there but not there.  There but not.

It’s just an extension of the ocean, yet it seems to have its own personality and its own peculiarities.  The water is often bluer; the birds are more in evidence; the scrub is a bit more varied and often greener.  The water is certainly calmer, and it is well, what? contained? — as opposed to the expansive seemingly infinite sea.

It’s as though someone scooped up a few large handfuls of ocean, and said, “See?  (Sea?)  Here it is, my little section, with the trees and houses and roads and train tracks, just for us to look at, instead of the impossibly big and endless and mind-boggling expanse of water that goes all the way to China!”

Either way, I am fortunate to get to look and see.

The tides are bringing huge numbers of stones — and shells — with them.  This stone was left balanced near the water line, and there were wavy turban snail shells abounding.  Well, relatively speaking.  Maybe I’ll get a photo of one of those next.

The stones make beach-walking a bit uncomfortable and precarious.  In some places they are piled rather deeply.  When you look down at the beach from the cliffs or stairways, there are broad swathes of stones, making wave patterns, somewhat like half ellipses, all along the sand.  You have to pick your way about, seeking out relatively sparsely-stoned areas to walk in.  Like above.