Winter of my discontent

A blue moon on Thursday, perigee on Friday, perihelion on Saturday with an 8.7 ft exchange, and what have we got in California? Rain. You'd think to an Oregon boy it wouldn't matter, but a full moon with cloud cover just isn't the same.

And so this is Christmas ...

Heard a Beach Boys riff on the radio today. It's hard to get used to the idea of Christmas in California. It's hard to get used to the idea of a Christmas without snow. Particularly when you've got friends where it's 32°. Hard to imagine kids who think this is normal.

Size matters

I was camping with the kids at Big Sur, trudging down the road past site after site, when my daughter
(age 5) asked, "We have a big tent, right Daddy?" "No, actually ours is kind of small." "But it's bigger than THAT one, isn't it?" "No, I think it's smaller."
She so wanted our tent to be big. Where we fit into the grand scheme of things--how we compared--was important. The fact that it's under 3 lbs. (a fact Daddy is quite pleased with) of course meant nothing.

Old man and the sea

The first surprise was the weather. The sun broke through and we found ourselves sheading a layer of clothes. We saw the tiniest crystal-clear jelly fish, like pulsating glass grapes. Paddled in close all the way up to Hopkins, where we darted outside to avoid seals, then back in again into that stormy 'room'. Couldn't have been more than a foot deep. Long green surf grass, pink encrusting algae and snails. An otter lay in the shallows and watched not twenty feet off to our right, chewing and looking on, utterly disconcerned. Then, paddling out the Northwest side we hopped over rolling incoming waves. To stretch out the day, on our way back we paddled out to bouy number 4, covered with lazing tawny sea lions. Where do people from Monterey retire to? How do you upstage this? Every cloud has a dark patch too.

Frogger

Nothing can get my heart racing like crossing a shipping channel. You get out the chart and read off the course: 3 miles across, 2 of them in shipping lanes, north bound and south. That's 40 minutes in shipping lanes. 40 long minutes. I must be in the wrong sport!

The calm before the storm

... SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 8 PM PDT THIS EVENING THROUGH LATE TONIGHT ...

... GALE WARNING IN EFFECT FROM LATE TONIGHT THROUGH TUESDAY EVENING ...

Columbus Day out on the bay. Absolutely calm in the lee. The shimmer of cat's paws touching down. Followed the shore up to Hopkins where I slowly, steadily, cautiously wove my way through
the rocks without flushing a single cormorant or brown pelican that looked on--or that I presume looked on, since I wasn't making eye contact. Four young sea otters were diving and basking and feeding in the shallows beyond. Making my way up the alcoves between Hopkins and Lovers Point I came across willets and black turnstones, a silent pair of black oystercatchers, and a drab grey robin-like bird I had never seen before--a "surfbird"--working the rocks.

Mystery solved

From the undeveloped site on Blake Island, you follow the path about a hundred yards to get to fresh water. When I rounded the corner the sun was just going down, a string of moored boats bathed in golden light. As I walked I could hear the whine of rubber on rumble strips in the distance, eighteen wheelers on I-5, no doubt. But how could that be? Here I was looking west, with an island between me and I-5, five miles away. There had to be another source, so I started looking around. It didn't take long to discover that the din was coming from the bushes themselves--it was bees!