The day after

Nothing earth shattering or horrible happened here from the "blizzard."  Apparently we don't have winter and snow anymore, we have only disasters and panic mongering.  Regardless, we have once again survived, relatively unscathed.  Photographic evidence thereof:

My self-cleaning back yard.  Thank you, wind!

House from the front.  Only one biggish drift, which needed to be cut thru so I can get mail delivery.

The beach this morning.  It's still there!  There are puddles on the wrong side of the dunes, in spots, but all in all it looks pretty much intact.

The gulls are still with us.  And sand mixed with snow looks like a frothy cappuccino or something.

One of my neighbors has her nephews over, and they shoveled out what I needed shoveled out, so I had minimal work to do outside.  Took them ten minutes to do what would have taken me a couple of hours.  Good work, guys!

Happy start of 2016

Not much to say.  Jan 1, 2016 on the beach.  Cold out there, nobody much around except me and Pablo.  The way I like it best.

Merry Christmas!

Since it is again likely that I might get around to sending out Christmas cards by maybe the end of April (at which time I figure it's too late and don't bother after all), I thought I'd put a message up here.  Anyone I know is, of course, hereby wished a lovely holiday season and the best of everything in the new year.  If I don't know you, that goes for you, too.

All I really want for Christmas is that people would find a way to get along.  We're all in this life together, we ought to help each other whenever we can, and put down the hate for good and all.

If anyone really desperately feels the need to give me a gift (aside from doing what I suggest in the paragraph above), please don't.  Instead, you can make a contribution to one or all of my favorite projects (links to their websites are in the parentheses):

On Site Opera Inc  (osopera.org), where we have a matching grant that runs to the end of December, and we could  love having your help in meeting the challenge!

Monmouth County SPCA (monmouthcountyspca.org), a great place to find a furry friend.

Westside German Shepherd Rescue (sheprescue.org), because DOGS!

And now a short picture show, because you have a lot to do in the next few days, and don't need to spend time on pictures.  But....

On a quasi-religious note, I give you "Madonna and Child:"

If you don't get the joke, shoot me an email and I'll explain.

And something more civic-minded:

And no, I didn't mess with the sky, it really did look like someone with a paintbrush had colored it in.

And now, I leave you with best wishes for the holiday and every day. 

It's that time of year, I guess....

But still too early to be this cold.  And I'm hearing of snow in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as Boston and northeastern PA.  Feh.

But we dug out the doggie hoodie this morning.  Even with, Pablo wasn't interested in being outside for very long.  Fine with me, I'm having the "we just closed the windows and I'm allergic to closed windows" syndrome with my sinuses, and being out in the biting wind is not fun when you already can't breathe too good.

Be that as it may, a couple of pictures from this morning's venture into nature.

And we've got a lot of beach, all of a sudden.  The rearranging that was done by the nor'easter a couple of weeks ago resulted in this.

I was standing at the water line, almost (had to keep my sneakers dry) when I took this one.  My house is almost dead center in the picture.  It was a long way away.  The dropoff we had all summer is gone now, and a lot of sand got added to the dunes by the storm.  And at low tide, we have all this beach.  You can see a couple of high tide lines, pretty much where the color of the sand changes.  But the tide pools are actually gone now, at low tide.  And the piece of our jetty that was exposed all summer is now a lot closer to being covered up again.

That's all you can see of the jetty now.  Enough to not notice the outliers, and trip over some rather solid granite if you're not watching where you're stepping.  Not so long ago, the jetty looked like this.

Mother Nature's been redecorating.  Always interesting, sometimes scary as hell, and different every day.

Sometimes you can get too far ahead of a trend

I was thinking about trends in things like real estate.  You want to be on the leading edge, but not so far out in front that the trend veers off and goes somewhere else after you've committed and it's too late to change.

This is an example of being too far ahead of the pack:

I sincerely doubt development will ever catch up with this project.  In fact, it'll likely be wiped out by the next high tide.

Or you could be too far behind, and miss the boat entirely.

My real question here is why this dock was built so high up to begin with.  The ground is where the ground is, you can see it in the picture, about a foot above the water level.  No clue how anyone ever got onto the dock in the first place.  Then it all sort of goes downhill.  This is actually at the river edge where Hartshorne Woods goes down to meet the Navasink. 

The other day Pablo and I took a walk on the paved sections of the trails in Hartshorne, he having exhibited a dislike of the unpaved trails.  I told him it was steep, and he nevertheless went down the hill enthusiastically. 

Going back up was another story.  Spurts and stops and starts and trotting and barely dragging along.  He's quite the actor.  And when we got home, he conked out for a couple of hours.  Not surprising.  That's my motto now, a tired dog is a good dog.  I know for sure if I can tire him out, I've gotten enough exercise.

9/11

As I was saying

It looks different every day.

Yesterday -

Today -

What a difference a day makes

24 little hours....

That's I suppose the best thing I like about the beach and ocean.  It's different every day, and different every few hours, in fact.  This morning:

This was actually about an hour later than the picture I posted yesterday.  So 25 or so hours difference. 

Cooler today, nice breeze, a bit less humidity.  Wish it would stay like this, but no chance, by midweek it's supposed to be hitting 90 again.  Tired of summer, ready for fall.

Did someone pull out the stopper?

The ocean looks oddly empty today.

Interesting evening lighting

We have these sunsets here that are not direct sunsets, this is looking kind of northwest rather than straight west, but I think the light is refracted by all the water, bent by the hill, and voila, here's the result.  If you flew directly over the hill and kept going, you'd be over water again in a short distance, the bay is up there.  So you get these fire in the sky kind of moments.

I like how it turns the water red.  Sort of biblical.  And those spots where there's no color, like the one that puts a water colored stripe between the red parts of the river.  And it's different every time.   New show every day, twice a day.  With some awesome moments in between.