By the time I got to the beach, the flowers had already started to shed petals into the sea. I don’t know what went down before I arrived, but a lovely bouquet in the surf can’t be a good sign.
Too bold on the first date?
Thanks for the birthday flowers, shame my birthday was last week?
Flowers can’t buy forgiveness, you @#$%^?
Graduation celebration run amuck?
Miss Runner-Up?
Or… ?
What do you think happened?
(The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Signs.)
Everything weathers or wears or frays, each according to its materials. It is such a commonplace process yet produces so many extraordinary results, including the intricate silhouettes of mountain ranges and beach sand that massages your feet as you walk.
I am especially fond of rust, provided it is not my stuff that is doing the rusting. A stairway in the U. Colorado, Boulder, athletic stadium is doing the rusting here. The pooled water is surely causing yet more rust, plus an artful reflection of a railing that was boring in real life:
Nearby, the stairs come with cartoon faces (I promised myself I wouldn’t mention beings from other dimensions again):
And these stairs suggest star nebula images from the Hubble telescope (if you ignore the yellow non-skid tape):
Out in West Hollywood, CA, I’m pretty sure this brand new sidewalk tree root cover is not supposed to be rusting already, but I’m glad that it is!:
This rusting sea wall in Santa Barbara, CA, looks very much like my daughter’s knee after a horrendous scrape, but let’s not talk about that and I will resist the urge to post a comparison photo:
Here is the sea wall with a little more context:
In the low-slung light just before sunset, even a rust hater would have to enjoy this view of the same sea wall:
The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is Fray.
Let’s face it, erosion is inevitable. In the pictures below, what you will see was once a sea wall, that is, a futile attempt to keep sand where we humans think it should stay. The ocean moved the sand, as it always does; and the ocean removed pieces of the wall, one chemically weathered molecule at a time. The result is a relic that charges my imagination every time I visit its beach, in Santa Barbara, California.
This former seawall now evokes a line of creatures.
The creatures have tide pools growing up their sides!
I’m guessing that the tidepool growth protects the remaining wall from more erosion.
Detail of a creature’s “leg”.
At the feet, anemones are open for business.
The dense organization of shells makes complex designs in the creature’s hide!
Sunset instills its own magic on the scene.
The WP Weekly Photo Challenge topic was “Relic”.
A gaggle of geese. A leap of leopards. A covey of quail. My vet has a poster with line after line of phrases that describe collections of critters, in ever-odder terms. A dule of doves. A charm of finches. A deceit of lapwings. An unkindness of ravens. Perhaps my favorite is a siege of herons. (Surely the crawfish in a local pond see herons that way, even though there is only one heron that plagues them. No, wait, plague would be locusts.) Have all these phrases truly been used? Maybe not – but for a richer language, let’s start today! (To get us started, I include more of the phrases at the bottom of this post.)
If I were to add pelicans to the list of phrases, I would have to call them an adoration of pelicans. What a spectacular creature the pelican is. Sitting around a dock, it may look homely and awkward, but airborne, it rules the coast. Pelicans fly together in innovative formations, skim the waves fearlessly, dive with conviction – and always get their fish.
I’ve taken many pictures of pelicans. In most of them, the bird appears as a speck on my camera lens. Last weekend, two pelicans put on an amazing show as I walked the beach. For the first time, I saw two pelicans dive simultaneously and hit the water a few feet apart. But they were coy and whenever I raised my phone camera, they masqueraded as specks. This was the closest I got to a good picture, so you can imagine the others:
But I’ve had better luck in the past. Here are some pelicans enjoying sunrise on both coasts of the U.S.:
Pelican at sunrise, East River, NYC.
Pelicans at sunrise, Carlsbad Beach, San Diego County, CA
And here is a particularly fine squadron, which always reminds me of that Far Side cartoon. You know the one, right? Birds of prey know they’re cool.
My best capture to date was this … er ….
HOLY FRIGGING — I’ve just spent what feels like a year scrolling through endless directories of unsorted photo files, in an unsuccessful search for one of my favorite shots. Ho-kay. Check back to this post later, I will add the photo when/if I find it. Perhaps it is finally time to attempt to organize my photos.
And in the meantime, enjoy some more critter phrases:
A crash of rhinoceroses.
A gang of elk.
A singular of boars.
A cast of woodpeckers.
A barren of moles.
A shrewdness of apes.
A smack of jellyfish.
A parliament of owls.
(This post is slightly in response to the recent WP photo challenge, “Split-Second Story”.)
Until a couple weeks ago, I had never been to Hawaii, which has always seemed terribly wrong, given that volcanoes and oceans are two of my favorite things. Also, I love that Hawaiian slack key guitar sound. So I was thrilled to get a chance to go to a conference in Honolulu, on Oahu, even though I knew that these were the Hawaiian island and area least likely to interest me.
I am a churlish tourist who hates being with her own kind. For me, the best way to travel is to plant myself somewhere for a stretch of time and get a sense of what it would be like to live there. During this one week trip I did get a couple chances to escape the tourist centers where my hotel and meetings were sited, and venture into areas where people actually live.
One dawn I walked east, away from the beach into a neighborhood of boxy tired apartment complexes. At 7 am everything was dark and closed except for the bus stops with folks headed away to work. I happened by a park with some amazing graffiti. Note that the white form is some kind of creature with a tail.
I’d heard about the fragrance of plumeria in Hawaii, and I adore the scent of the small, captive plant a friend somehow keeps alive in a container in his non-tropical garden. I was disappointed to discover that on Oahu, the plumeria are trees with blooms too high to smell! (Turns out I should have bought a plumeria lei, to envelop myself with the scent as I went through my day.)
My last afternoon on Oahu, a Hawaiian coworker drove me around the eastern corner of the island. We stopped at a viewpoint with trails that could have taken us even higher up the mountain.
A hang-glider happened by.
From the viewpoint, I caught my first look at the north side of the island. After ogling the view, we headed down the hill, west and north, to lunch in a working class community nestled behind that beach.
We stopped at a local hangout of a takeout restaurant.
After ordering the barbeque chicken platter, we had lunch in the adjoining, semi-open-air dining room. There, between the walls and ceiling, dwell scruffy and bold pigeons who come out to forage for scraps. According to my local pal, pigeons are a new addition to the island, and they are quickly becoming a nuisance. (No. Really?) Over the last few years, the finches have disappeared from his bird feeders, crowded out by the pigeons. Turns out finches are plentiful in Hawaii. People trap the finches and sell them to pet stores. There is no market for pigeons.
The dining area walls are painted with scriptures and lightning bolts.
And the walls are covered with scriptural graffiti – Bible quotes in the handwriting of countless patrons.
After lunch, we took the highway back to Honolulu. The mountains are actually the back rim of an ancient volcanic crater. The rest of the crater rim collapsed into the ocean, many thousands of years ago, in a massive landslide that created an enormous tsunami.
The highway cuts through the mountains in a looooong tunnel. Here is the tunnel entrance
and this is the view upon exit.
The area looks remote but is scant few miles and minutes from Honolulu’s congestion.
These glimpses of Oahu away from Waikiki Beach gave me a better understanding of why people so love these islands.
See? Churlish. I told you.
This is the third of three posts about my trip to Hawaii. I also blogged about the sights near Waikiki and a walk from Waikiki to Diamond Head.
There are a lot of great scenes waiting for cameras in Hawaii as I learned when I visited the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time. I made the trip for work, so I spent most of my time at the convention center, or near my hotel on Waikiki Beach. My last day there, I walked a few miles from my hotel to another set of meetings near Diamond Head, and took lots of photos.
That distant hill and point is Diamond Head. I took this photo from the harbor near my hotel on the afternoon of my arrival. I didn’t see any bugs in Hawaii but saw much evidence of their existence, such as in the trunk of this tree.
The walk to Diamond Head was the most ambitious excursion of my trip and most of it took me through spectacular scenery. in the distance is my goal, lit by dawn sunlight.
The banyan tree is a common sight on Oahu. Older trees have roots that grow up and add themselves to the trunk, creating a broad, ropey base, like this tree en route to Diamond Head.
Whatever you do, don’t feed those …. um …. those…. Altered signs seem to be a trend here.
And then there are signs that promise other alterations. Why wait until dinner? I call this one cutting to the chase.
I loved the rough surface of this jetty, which exists to protect tourists from slipping into the sea. It may be too close to the lunchtime happy hour to succeed at all times, however.
Now I’m on the Diamond Head side of my earlier photos, looking west and back toward the Waikiki Beach hotels.
The road took me uphill through neighborhoods that reminded me of Santa Barbara, California. Only 9a but it was getting warm.
I went past cliffside parks with trails down to the ocean, some of which were not safe to hike. Or anyway I think that’s what the sign was trying to tell me.
There was an old lighthouse, now occupied by an island bigwig.
Surfers in Hawaii have so many choices of places with great waves!
During my week on Oahu, the weather fluctuated continuously although the temperature held to the high 70s, low 80s. Sunny then cloudy then drizzle then wind. Blasts of rain punctuated with balmy breeze. Humid then less humid then more humid again. Clouds from the north were always piled up against the mountains that stretch along the center of the island. I took this photo of the clouds and mountains from the glass elevator at my hotel.
Here is a cloudy moment near Diamond Head.
It came amidst the sunny moments like this one.
This is the second of three posts about my trip to Hawaii.
I also blogged about the sights near Waikiki and glimpses of non-tourist Oahu.
Recently, I was lucky enough to visit the Hawaiian island of Oahu for the first time, and now here are some posts to share some of the experience.
Oahu is one of the smallest of the Hawaiian islands, and by far the most densely populated. I made the trip for work, so I spent most of my time indoors in meetings. Still, I managed to enjoy a week of sunrise and sunset at the beach, and although I was “stuck” in tourist-riddled Waikiki Beach – well, there are reasons that locations become popular, and here the natural beauty shines through the murk of tourism and overpopulation. Honolulu may be the least lovely spot in Hawaii, but that least surpasses many a most.
To get to Hawaii from Los Angeles I took a five hour flight over the Pacific Ocean.
Traffic sucked on the shuttle from the airport to Waikiki. Turns out traffic sucks everywhere in Honolulu. I could even see traffic snarls from my hotel room.
Fortunately my room had a big window and this was the rest of the view, at night
and during the day.
I was on the 17th floor and I kept the large window open all the time to luscious warm fresh air.
The harbor water is brown for at least two reasons. The rocks and dirt are all volcanic – very high in iron – which makes standing water look rusty.
Also, the harbor water is filthy. You probably can’t see the black fish nibbling this trash from below.
Best to view the harbor at night, especially when the neighboring hotel stages its weekly fireworks display.
One wonders whether the hotels also stage the vast number of rainbows that materialize over their roofs. Many are double rainbows.
Here’s a rainbow with a nearly full moon, just prior to a golden sunset.
I spent my days at meetings in the convention center, where this was the view of the ocean.
But the sunsets were my own to enjoy.
And I was up to await the dawn, just like these palm trees.
Amazing how many people were in the water at dawn!
Hawaiian beaches are gorgeous yet incomplete, as they lack pelicans. There are plenty of pigeons and seagulls. Also, this handsome bird hung out with fisherman near a bridge.
He never let me get any closer than this. Catlike, he would walk as though indifferent to me, but aware of my every move, to maintain this distance whether I slowed down, sped up, or stopped.
I have multiple pictures of this bird, taken on more than one day, all at this distance.
This is the first of three posts about my trip to Hawaii. I also blogged about a walk from Waikiki to Diamond Head and glimpses of non-tourist Oahu.
The Gulf Coast of Florida (and surely, many other locations) has beaches where fossil shark teeth are abundant. My young nephews collect pails full of them! (That is my idea of a fun vacation: planted at the ocean, sifting shells and sand to hunt treasures.) On a brief recent visit to a beach near Venice, Florida, I spent about an hour on one of those beaches and made some amazing finds!
There, see all those fossil teeth?
Actually, you need to look more closely. Be prepared to be distracted by all the amazing shell fragments!
Sometimes a tooth sits on the surface in an obvious manner but usually you will need to sift the shells, a handful at a time.
The results of my hour of searching, discovered one tooth at a time.
The WP Weekly Photo Challenge is to show “one”.
If you read this blog much, you know I like to see stuff in other stuff.
Here is a rock that sits right in the surf on a Santa Barbara beach. It’s got a big hollow with ever-changing sand deposits. Last time I was at this beach, the rock looked like a fossil shark tooth to me. What do you see?
What do you see?
Later that day, the surf developed the rock’s next persona:
Tide coming in.
(The Weekly Photo Challenge wants to see lines and patterns.)
If I must acknowledge getting older, then I prefer to have my birthday celebration spread out over days. This year I’ve got a birthday week – and if I count the concert with a friend in November, I’ve got a birthday season!
Hiking at dawn. It has been too long.
Highlights this year are two dawn hikes (my first hikes with my new hip), a trip to the beach, and dinner at a favorite restaurant. My kids also gave me a book of dustbowl-era political and social photographs:
Looks like an interesting book and its photos are unforgettable.
It’s an awesome book but what really makes it special is the thoughtfulness with which they chose it. (They figured it fit with my love of Woody Guthrie and my recent interest in traditional bluegrass.)
At last, hiking again!
Required Writing 