My nieces are here! They’re here for the whole summer! I’m so happy to have them. Of course it means we are running out of food every other day and there are clothes left on the bathroom floor regularly but they are a such a lovely sight for sore eyes. We’ve really missed them.

(photo taken by Rapunzel)

I was planning on keeping Bug in preschool all summer so I could keep to my work schedule but now that they are all playing so happily every day outside all the live long day, I decided to keep her out for the summer. It’s saving me quite a bit of money which is nice.

It’s going to be a summer to remember.

So far we’ve taken them into Orange County for Bug’s gymnastics/ballet class, dinner with Toby and a trip to the beach even though the sun was already down.

They had missed the beach. Sometimes I forget how lucky we are that we see it regularly. Super Chic wanted to go swimming right away of course. I think that girl is immune to cold.

They ran around crazy until it was dark.

Just like old times.

On Memorial Day my mom thought it would be nice to visit my grandma’s grave and put Grandpa’s flowers from the memorial service on her grave. He’s going to be buried there too as soon as the morgues do whatever it is that they do. I’d never been there so it was nice to see the gravestone and look at all the flags for the soldiers.

I wish Bug could have known my grandma. They were kindred spirits in their love of pink.

We attempted a family portrait but the sun was bright and harsh.

Then the park on the way home. Even my dad got in on the swinging.

It’s going to be one long fun memorable summer I know already. So I’m prepared with chore charts to keep things under control so I don’t go crazy. I’m thinking we might go somewhere special if they can fill these up with a lot of stars. I’m pretty sure they can. :)

everybody from secretagentjo on Vimeo.

I love my niece-com-poops.

Yesterday was the Sand Castle Festival at our local beach. I’ve blogged about it for years. We even entered it in 2004 but sadly those blog posts are lost. I have them somewhere on a CD but I’ve just never gotten around to re-uploading them.

Anyway, the Sand Castle Festival is near and dear to my heart. I love it and try to visit it every year. I take horrible pictures every year too because it is just about impossible to capture on camera how fun it really is. I try and try but you just can’t crop out the people and all their junk and still show the hustle and bustle of it. Plus, sand is never as photogenic as it seems in your mind’s eye. I should probably use a better camera but it’s the beach and no matter how careful you are there’s that nasty sand that gets in lenses and breaks them.

Now I have a new problem. My new laptop has some color-temperature issues so I’m at a complete loss on how to color-correct my photos. I’m opting for not correcting at all. If you notice a difference in my photos as of late, that is why. They all look greenish to me. But if I correct them to my eye they’ll probably look purplish to you. Hopefully I’ll get it figured out soon. Maybe they’re not so bad.

Poor Bug. I should have taken a better shot of her with both eyes open.

As usual when we visit the Sand Castle Festival, we got inspired to make our own castle. Everyone does. This year was extra fun for me though because Bug is really getting castle-building now. We certainly practice enough all year round. She doesn’t topple things over just when they’re perfectly built anymore and she’s great at fetching water.

If you know anything about anything when it comes to building sand castles, you know how important water is. If fact, in a proper contest you really have to spend a good hour or more beforehand soaking everything down. That’s the only way to keep the sand solid enough to carve without it crumbling into a flat mess.

All that water fetching means somebody has to get wet and for some reason it’s always overcast on Sand Castle Festival day, and just the tiniest bit chilly. So of course we wear long pants, or in Bug’s case, what she wore to church. (What, doesn’t everyone go running around the waves in their pink puffy skirts? Insert eye-rolling here.) No matter how careful we are, there’s always going to be a wave that comes in faster than we expected and washes all the way up to our knees. We both got soaked, naturally.

After years and years of living by the beach, sandy wet clothes don’t even faze me anymore. What can you do? It’s just part of life. Sand in your bed, sand in you hair, sand in your carpet…if you have a sand aversion, don’t visit me.

It is all worth it when you have good times like these though. I actually came down to the beach in a bad mood. Something Toby had said or done had set me off and no matter what I did I couldn’t get the negative thoughts out of my head. I desperately wanted to hash it out with him but arguing with him during his work day means he loses valuable time, and he is always so busy and behind schedule. I knew I had to shelve it and work it out with him later.

I hate shelving arguments. They just fester and fester in my head and I can’t think straight. I’m definitely the type who likes to confront things head on and not bottle them up inside. Unfortunately, I’ve had to learn with time that I can’t fight fight fight. I have to calm myself and there is nothing better than making a drip castle to do that.

Squeezing the wet sand through your hand drip by drip by drip can be very zen. Before I knew it I was festering less and focusing more on the tiny drip towers each handful would make. My kid was happy, my mind was quiet, all was well with the world again. And then people started stopping by and telling us how cool our castle was. It kind of surprised me actually since there were castles everywhere to comment on. Why bother with ours? I’m sure my adorable pink-outfitted assistant had a lot to do with it but it got me to thinking…

We’re good at this. Maybe we should enter the contest together next year, just Bug and me.

The thing I love about winter and fall at the beach is how clear the sky gets. The skies are so blue and the clouds seem to go on up forever unlike they do in the summer and spring when they hover low and thick because we usually have a marine layer of fog and low clouds. I catch myself looking up at the sky often and wondering if I could be like Georgia O’Keefe and paint the clouds. What colors would I use? How could I capture how big and vast they are and how small they make me feel?

I was out in the desert with my Dad this last week and I caught myself admiring the crazy cloud formations after a quick desert thunderstorm. There were big giant towering formations with glints of gold around their edges. It was beautiful.

“Aren’t they amazing?” I asked my dad as we were walking between my mom’s old house and her new studio apartment next door, carrying a load of household items with us.

“What? The sky”? he asked, looking at me like I’d lost my marbles. “It’s just the sky.”

I shook my head in disgust. How many people have I encountered who could walk right past a brilliant sunset and not even notice it? But before I shuffle my dad off into the pile of people who just don’t see things the way I do, I have to give him a break. He’s a long haul trucker, and he does drive across the country weekly. He sees all kinds of skies. I notice bright brilliant skies more because here at the beach we are so often socked in with fog or a hazy mist. In fact, it’s misty so often that when it’s clear, the mountains scare us. Where’d you come from Saddleback?!! Of course, I love the fog. But I love these crazy blue skies too.

We had a great beach day, Bug and I. It was pretty hot and the water was soooo warm! It’s funny how that happens. It has something to do with the upwelling of cold water from the bottom of the ocean in summer and then that goes away in the fall. Water temperatures are much colder in July and August than they are in October. If you like to swim in the ocean, I’d suggest going now. It’s the perfect temperature. I hardly ever go in the water since I’m terrified of big surf but I spent quite a bit of time splashing around and even getting wet all the way up to my hair yesterday. Of course I didn’t swim out past the surf, like I’d like to. I have to wait until Bug finally learns how to swim to do that.

So anyway, I’m reading a book my friend Sonja lent me, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as you can see up there in that picture Bug took of me. It has me just as perturbed as that other book. Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and not think about these terrible things. La la la la la la, I am IGNORANT!!! As most everyone already knows it’s all about the author Barbara Kingsolver living off her land without being part of the massive industrial food chain that America has become today. No more tomatoes from Chile, no more hybrid turkeys that will never reach their full maturity because if they did they’d become too fat to walk, etc. It’s all very well and fine and I admire her greatly but I just discovered Costco this year so it is not sitting with me well. Lettuce in GIANT bags! Peppers for less than a dollar each!!! Please don’t take that away from me! Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. It’s still a very interesting book though and it has me looking twice at the fruits and vegetables I buy.

Which brings me to this little Japanese-French bakery another friend of mine took me to the other day. Cream Pan in Tustin. We missed breakfast so I really don’t know how wonderful their French pastries are. I’m sure they are absolutely divine because that’s what everyone says and I could tell by the meticulous way they kept their shop that anything they did would be perfection. It was so cute and French inside. But mostly what impressed me was the thriving garden of Japanese eggplants growing in front of their store.

See? Eggplant! Great big purple beauties too. There were bunches of them. I don’t even like eggplant (I don’t think; I haven’t really tried it enough to say) and these look good enough to eat to me. I might even go back there and try an eggplant sandwich just so I can say I’ve eaten one grown in a strip mall. It truly amazed me. The plants looked strong and healthy, not covered with dirt and brake dust like I would expect from growing right along side a parking lot.

And then on the other side of the building was a trellis of bitter melons! I actually didn’t know what they were but a nice woman was walking by and overheard me wondering about them aloud to Bug. How ingenious is this? The vines act as a sun shade to the restaurant inside AND they grow melons! Or something like that. There were also some sunflowers and something growing along the bottom that I didn’t really look closely at because I was too overwhelmed by how cool the vine sun shade was. This small plot gardening put me to shame. I have about a four-foot patch of dirt between my neighbor’s air conditioner and my other neighbor’s fence and sadly I’ve done nothing with it but grow lemon-scented geraniums and buried a few dead birds. The geraniums have thrived and taken over but they’ve given me no fruit or vegetables. Harumph!

Anyway…

Back to what I am doing well…

…enjoying my beach and these amazing fall skies. I really need to break out the paints and attempt to capture this. Though I know I would fail miserably.

* * *

Also! Please go read and comment on my Pancakes! post for Kellogg’s Share Your Story program. Don’t be shy! You might win $100!