On the way to the beach.  The magenta center is so intense.  I would love a beach house with light wood floors, white walls, white slip-covered sofas, and magenta throw pillows.  A bit of turquoise and persimmon, too.  Just a bit. Yum.  We don’t quite have a beach house despite being so close to the beach.

Our furnishings have been collected over the years and tend toward practical brown sofas and brown leather recliners and lots of patterned Oriental rugs, and even painted patterned south Asian cabinets, with some French antiques of gorgeous walnut and fruit- wood.  Grateful though I am for their comfort and sturdiness,  they all seem very heavy here,  

These flowers are so LIGHT.  I want to let in the light!

At night.  You probably can tell what it is?  The geometry of machines is a pretty thing.  Kawasaki…let the good times roll.  Advertising leaves pervasive tracks, as it were, in the mind.  The Kawasaki tracks.

I don’t much notice cars or motorcycles generally, but this compact and elegant machine whispered “cute” to me, rather insistently.  I find the repetition of angles and the negative spaces and the silver and the light spots and the shininess of the paint all compelling.  9:30 pm, Little Italy, San Diego, CA, USA, North America, Planet Earth, the struggling blue orb…

A plant, a song, a political theory; an image.  They almost look like little shells, especially at the bottom.

I listened to the Glenn Miller version.  Our parents’ generation had some really good music too!

Getting up and out early has its rewards!

Hairy strawberries?  Have you ever seen anything like these?  they are Indonesian [tropical] fruits and I don’t care what they taste like — they’re so impossible-looking!

So who was the first person to figure out how to eat these?  They will be fun to try.  I could be watching the convention, and here I am looking at hairy red orbs!

I am You.  We are Them.  There is no Us.  There is no Them.

When will we ever learn?  Well, sometimes our walks through the campground or on the beach yield surprises.  This was one.  Good, eh?  Especially in these challenging times.

How do we become transcendent while staying focused on doing good, *thinking*, making change, being present?   We are You are We…

I don’t know what this is, but I’d not seen it before.  At the campground again.  Isn’t the pink and yellow-green lovely?  And the gorgeous symmetrical marching-piling-climbing of the leaf-lets (?) makes me want to taste it.  Reminds me of asparagus, one of my favorite green vegetables.  Maybe *the* favorite.

I keep wondering if/when I’ll run out of new images.  Never, I hope!

The sky was big this noon, matching the sea.  And these wisps looked as though they were skipped onto the palette with dry brush and a light hand.  Dandelion?

I wish the answers were indeed blowing in the wind…

We went to an informal car show in the next town over.  People drive their classic cars and park them in parking spaces in a few blocks that are set aside.  Then bunches of people stroll, admire, chat, and photograph.

So here’s a crop of one of my photos.  I’m not very excited about cars in themselves, but I did enjoy the paint jobs, the reflections, the geometry, and, in a few cases, the general design.  This is an intentionally blurry close-up of one that caught my eye.

Too beautiful for words…

Well, close enough.  These velvety leaves are perhaps as compelling as the purple flowers that are part of the same plant.  I’ve shown the flowers before; the leaves caught my eye today.  The veining on the soft surface is subtle; the yellow-green on parts plus the white edging are a nice contrast with the overall matte texture.  I can see why Ellsworth Kelly did such gorgeous, elegant works with leaves.

Walked into the campground and saw these festooned [over]* the fence,  providing both privacy for the occupants and a piece of art installation,  probably unintentional, but oh so lovely!  Plus, with the good wind we have, they’ll probably be nice and dry when needed, despite how humid it’s been.

Wonder if they’ll be there tomorrow?  The campsites are limited to eight occupants and that was a lot of towels.  But if you’re swimming and surfing and showering, you need a lot of towels, I guess.

The angle makes it look like the towels go on and on, into the trees.  Accidental/incidental effect.  Good.

• Now there’s a usage question.  The towels festooned the fence? Or were they festooned OVER the fence?  The former sounds right; is the latter ok as well?

Pies, that is.  Easy-peasy and time-consuming.  Just wrapping 24 little devils…make the cake batter, bake in two separate batches.  Make the filling (don’t even think of asking what’s in the filling, just know it’s a splurge!) then lay out 24 pieces of plastic wrap.  Then apportion the filling, spread it, cap it, wrap it — and eat it.  Enjoy.  Yum.  Should do it more often, but then would they be a treat?  You betcha!

It’s dry and scrubby near the beach, with lots of bare, sandy expanses.  Much of it is filled with brushy, weedy-looking grayness.  And then this pops out, looking more like spring than midsummer.

I’ve looked it up — it could be a poppy or a Sierra sun cup or…well, someone with better resources might identify it.

A bit of sunshine!

Trying to avoid the ‘heartache on heartache’ part.

This was this morning and it was lovely.  Not my  favorite ‘no horizon’ but still.  Walked down to see the sunset (teensy green flash!) tonight, too.  So it’s been an ocean day, even if not on the beach.

The sun sneaked under the cloud bank so we could watch the last five minutes of the set.  There’s the sun and the set, according to my daughter around age 4.  She was onto something there.

Blue on blue.  Sunset.  Yes, thank you.

In rust for sure.  Rust is very compelling, though.  Lots of people photograph rusting old things.  Or rusting new things.  Decay.  Disintegration.  Earth returning.  Better it than me.

You couldn’t make a pattern like that if you tried.  Its very randomness is essential to its beauty.  And those little freckles at the top:  aren’t they almost enchanting?  Incipient rust, or baby rust.  And the network of crazing in the white paint.  A constellation of crazing.

I’m having a little trouble with the world right now.  It’s only a little comforting to know that many others are also, but what can we do?  What can we do?  Not just sit and rust.  Sit and trust?  Not enough.

I sit and knit as the world seems to come unraveled.  Brexit, France, Turkey.  And the Republican National Convention starts Monday in Cleveland.  I have great wariness; the world seems ripe for change, but the change needs to be a coming together, not a tearing apart.

I don’t talk much about politics in this blog, but threat seems thick in the atmosphere and permeates even my writing.  All I can do (other than vote and make my voice heard) is MAKE THINGS, GIVE.  I made hot fudge sauce and gave some to the campground hosts, and some to my neighbor.  I make meals for people.  (Another round of pizza dough this afternoon, in search of excellence!)  I make art to please and to puzzle and to ask and to dance visually.  I write to explore, to look at alternatives.  I knit to comfort (giving scarves, hats to those in need; socks to those I love.)

I’m writing a story, a series of stories, about an alternative place, alternative feelings,  another choice, an antidote to the dystopic fiction that seems so dominant right now.

It’s not enough.  I must try to do more.

Companions to the rusted metal fire pits.  Piles of things are so compelling.  And the black and white. and the slats and parallel lines (sort of), and the screws…the campground yields unexpected treasures.  This was chained off behind a service building and inaccessible for photography except at this angle.  You take what you can get…

It looks like it’s dipping into the sky or the water, making a dent.  The cloud layer was at the horizon and could also look like a land mass.  The ocean is the same differently every time.  Our ocean.  My ocean.  Your ocean.  It’s all of ours and we need to take care of it and I like to honor it.  So.

Its scent was rosemary.  The leaves could be rosemary.  On the other hand, there are many varieties of eucalyptus around and some of them smell a lot like rosemary, that sharp medicinal odor that I find oddly compelling and repellent at the same time.  (I don’t like floral-tasting food or drink in general — many teas, gin, anise, chamomile, rosemary!)

Then there’s the question of wildness.  Do the campgrounds plant stuff or is much of it just whatever drifts in and takes root in the poor sandy soil?  Anyway, I liked the pale purplish flowers, which remind me of dandelion puffs, except with color.  And a bit more elegance and distinction.  Whatever they are.

Like layers in an archaeological dig.  I’m not sure why I took this photo; perhaps its mundane-ness (mundacity? not mendacity!)  was somehow compelling.  The dents, the dead dullness of the gray, the rust, the Toyota insignia, the blackness of the negative space?  There’s perhaps more there than I thought, or perhaps less.  It’s there.

Well, I’m headed that way, anyhow.  I made the crust from scratch yesterday, with King Arthur bread flour.  Made the tomato sauce today with tomato paste to which I added my also-homemade herbal vinaigrette, in order to thin it to pizza-topping consistency.  I didn’t make the cheese (fresh mozzarella, grated hard mozzarella, and ricotta) or grow the veggies!

We actually made two pizzas and cooked them, one at a time, on the new grill, using the new ceramic pizza stone.  (The first one got transferred to this metal pan in a barely warm oven while the second one cooked.)

They were ok to good.  Need lots of work.  The crust was too thick and I overcooked it, so it was too dry.  Next time: make the crust thinner (easier said than done!) and brush it with olive oil all the way to the edges before adding the toppings.  In my quest for more subtle, less gooey pizza, I also under-topped it.  A bit more sauce, a bit more cheese next time for sure.  And there will be a next time.  We each had two+ large slices as it was.  And the kitchen didn’t get overheated with an oven on 500 for 45 minutes.

Am I starting to write a food blog?

I think at the Botanic Gardens.  Reminds me of all that wisteria in Italy.  Things will remind me of Italy for a while, I reckon.

Purple is an amazing color.  It seems to me to be one of those neither-here-nor-there yet best-of-both-worlds colors.  Squint and you see pink.  Squint again and you see blue.  But it’s unequivocally purple, and proud of it.  And it’s draped so very gently over those very round-y, boulder-y, rocky rocks.  Like a gift handed out just so, murmuring, “You’re welcome.”

We went to the Safari Park two weeks ago and spent some time with the lovely lemurs.  My, they are cute.  Scurrying around, stopping suddenly to stare at us (and us back at them), and then hiding out in companionable closeness with their buddies in the trees.

An added bonus was our daughter’s friend’s knowledge of these cuties; she works there, gave us a tour, and knew them all by name.  (Thank you, Lauren!) They all looked like masked bandits, one much the same as the next to us, but she could tell them apart by their markings.  And pretty good protective coloration, eh?

With perhaps some affinity with Georgia?  I don’t even remember where this was, but it was taken the same day as the butterfly of yesterday, so probably *near* the beach.  The beach is so much more than water, sand, and sky!

I’ve taken fewer photos the last two months, possibly because we are walking a bit less and I don’t walk on the beach in the summer.   I am bait for sand flies and the bites are too unpleasant.  So, I need to vary my walking lest I (horrors!) run out of photos to share.   Onward to the lagoon, with its own ecosystem and opportunities.

Or moth?  Or?  Whatever it is, it’s mighty pretty.  And for some reason, a bit forbidding/eerie.  The colors?  The bit of red?  Look at those dots of yellow on its rear whatever-they-ares, the skinny projections sticking out.  And the dot of black in the third yellow patch from the top.  Cool genetics.  Intense colors.  Very clearly delineated pattern.  Sure doesn’t look like camouflage coloration.  Maybe it’s ‘stay-away-I’m-not-yummy’ coloration!

From the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park.  The artist is Pan Gongkai (b. 1947) and this is a portion of a very large piece that runs horizontally to span many feet of  a wall.

I love the fat and thin strokes, the varying densities of the ink, the fluidity (!) of the motion, the balance of white space.  This was a treat; I had gone to the museum to see a quilt show whose origin is the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  I had seen the quilts in Boston two summers ago and it was a pleasure to see them again.  But this was an added bonus!

This was held at the Oceanside Museum of Art in June.  It was so quirky and fun!  Artists volunteered/donated*  4″ x 6″ pieces of art to be sold for $20 each, to raise funds for children’s programs at the museum.  KIds’ (under 18) art was only $10 each.  There were many more pieces than I’ve shown here, from photography to drawing to textiles to watercolor.

It was well-attended, and I donated five pieces and bought some too.  I like the idea that original art should be affordable.  We all make art, at least when we are young, in school (hoping all children get to go to school.)  We don’t need to stop — making or appreciating.  Thank you.

*Artists are always being asked to donate.  “It’s good exposure.”  Sigh.  Just ask your favorite chef to donate a dinner for 12 at your house — good exposure?  Haha.  I don’t hear poets or musicians or playwrights or others being asked, either…well, in this case, I did it anyway.

Near the beach, in May.  After we got back from the trip, I resumed taking photos on my walks.  I like discovering that there are whole big categories of things to notice.  One could do a big series on pods, much like, say, floors.

These look almost edible, but rather tough.  I doubt they are — edible, that is.  I think it’s cool that they have indents in their outer shapes, like waists or appendages.  But not all of them.  Now I have to notice pods more.

In the group fiber show I’m in, one of the artists constructed three huge, varied pods from paper, plant fibers, and other organic-seeming materials.  They are quite complex and compelling.

American in terms of the amount of meat.  I’d never cooked a tri-tip before.  Made up a marinade with soy sauce, brown sugar, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, mustard, pepper…4 hours in the fridge.  Roasted the corn on the grill, then the tri-tip.  The corn salad is just the sweet corn (brushed with olive oil, salt, pepper, dill) with some sauteed minced red onion and some feta, along with a very small amount of oil/vinegar homemade salad dressing.  In the same pan as I did the onion, I cooked the portabella mushrooms, halved grape tomatoes, and spinach in a bit of olive oil and butter, just a bit.  Salt, pepper, nutmeg.

Wished I’d invited friends, but it was all an experiment.  I’m amazed at how well the tri-tip came out.  Will repeat it for sure.  Doesn’t look like an Italian meal at all — that will be tomorrow night.  (With leftover tri-tip sandwiches for lunch soon!)

Back to the beach, its flora and fauna, its physics, its comfort, its freshness.

Giving way from Italy to Southern California feels like a letdown of sorts, but it isn’t really.  It just points out to me that I can hone my observations so that I don’t take the local splendors for granted.

As in, my that’s quite an intense flowery flower, its yellowy yellow anything but shy against the green-black foliage.  Its rather regal, too.  Regal gold.  Regal shape.  Regal presence.