Golden Gardens park

The low tide was very low today (yesterday's was officially the lowest), and volunteer naturalists were out in force. One showed me how if you look closely at the grassy seaweed, it is teeming with skeleton shrimp -- brown twiggy beasts that clamp onto the seaweed with their hinder appendages, or creep along it like inchworms. Not, strictly speaking, shrimp. But also genuine shrimp, green torpedo-shaped like a fleck of vegetation, who turn invisible by drawing in their legs and drifting.

Sea lions! Their path cut close to the beach, and they said "ork ork ork".

Also overhead in passing: "See, I can totally understand why she had to do that, on your honeymoon night."

I shot the 25th frame on a 24-frame roll of film that had been sitting in my analog camera since the day we got the digital. Then half a roll of Tri-X, which can expect to see the light of printing sometime next year. It was very nice to work with a camera again that has a sophisticated exposure system. Man.

Without thinking I stepped up on a rock. It was covered with anemones. I'm sorry.

The bird pond had a clutch of three ducklings, a red-winged blackbird who perched very close and interspersed beautiful song with sonar pings, and the swallows or swifts or such were out in the bright afternoon, skimming and swerving. It must be great fun.

I found a big starfish the exact color of Tinky Winky.