Last SoCal
There they are - yellow panties, sitting a top a load of laundry. They’re bright and lay in contrast to the pile of muted grays and blues of shirts and jeans they rest on, like a sun rising over a wintry New England landscape. Maybe I think too much about landscapes.
This is the last weekend in SoCal and of fun and sex before heading up the coast. It turns out the walls of the BnB are paper thin, and we could hear our neighbor quietly suppress a cough in the next room that sounded like he was on the bed with us. Shit. I watched Arabian Nights (which I absolutely love) and got rested up before heading out to meet the day. For the first time since leaving Vegas on Friday I feel like I’m at 100%. It feels good to be like myself again, and not the wretched decaying husk of what I used to be. A day and a half is a long time to not feel like yourself.
We left the BnB and got a plastic snake at a Goodwill store in Ventura for $2.99. A little girl swinging around a streetlight stopped me on the corner and asked what it was and then said I should scare people with it. Bless her. Put the reptile on the roof of the Ford and it is exactly the flavor it needed! Afterwards we went down to the beach and saw a Kia Sol police car. That’s how you know it’s a good town when the their cars are so delicate. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cop cars in my hometown are bullet proof. Drove west to Santa Barbara and got some zip ties at a hardware store to hold down the new snake before heading down to the marina at sunset.
It's great to visit familiar places with people that have a vastly different perspective from yourself and can add flavor to things we see every day. My dinner date was a fishing boat captain from Alaska and she told me all about the boats in the marina, what they were good for, and how they handled. I’m quite pleased with myself too, for reciprocity is the key to every relationship and I was able to school her on camera settings. She only had a cell phone, but when I started in photography years ago it was on a cell phone too, and the settings on a camera phone’s pro mode are the same used in a DSLR or mirrorless camera. This is the second time I’ve gone out shooting with her, and I’ve seen her post many landscapes and subject studies on social media since we were on that island in Alaska.
We had dinner at a pricey place on the water and as we were walking along the beach she pointed out an amazing moon rise over the docks. We stopped and I got a ton of pics at the water's edge. I wish I had brought the tripod but I wasn’t thinking we’d be shooting after dark. Damn. The moon was absolutely huge too - if it had been just a bit closer I could have made out the craters. It must have been a super moon and in my ignorance I lost track of their schedule. I turned the Canon’s image stabilizer on and snagged a couple alright ones though.
