The Moss Beach Kitty-Cat

I'd hoped to see my friend Rob this weekend. He lives in Berkeley and we only see each other every few months. He's moving in May (to a new house also in Berkeley), so he'll be busy for the foreseeable future, and we'd hoped to get together once more before then. But he apparently had a new case dropped on him at work (he's a lawyer) and expected to spend the weekend working on it. Darn.

Ceej and I talked last week about getting together soon, so I e-mailed her when things with Rob fell through, but she has a friend from out-of-town around, and that didn't sound too promising for seeing her.

Subrata had mentioned that he didn't have much in the way of plans for this weekend and that I could give him a call. So this morning it occurred to me that it would be nice to get outside today, maybe head to the ocean. So I took care of some things in the morning, and phoned Subrata a bit after noon. (He's a late sleeper; usually stays up until 2 am or later, I think, every night.) But it turned out that although he was interested, he had some shopping that he needed to do ("before my shoes fall apart", as he put it), so he took a pass.

By this time the afternoon was getting started, and I'd been thinking of going to Moss Beach up around Half Moon Bay, and I figured if I'm going to go then I should go. I thought about calling Trish, but she lives in the opposite direction, and it's never quite certain where she is at any particular time, so if she had to drive all the way up here, it would get pretty late. (Okay, it's a lame excuse, but I was getting tired of trying to organize something.)

Anyway, the upshot is that I ran a couple of errands, and then went to up Moss Beach on my own.

Moss Beach's tide pools were one of the highlights of my trip to California two years ago, and I like to go there every few months anyway. It's about a third of the way up the peninsula, and as the car drive it's about 45 miles from my apartment. It takes maybe an hour to get there because you have to go over the hills via Half Moon Bay Drive, which is a two-lane highway, albeit not a terribly slow one.

Except today, it seems everyone else in the Bay Area was going to the ocean, and there was a long line of traffic on the road over the hills. Fortunately, being a weekend, there were baseball games on, and I got to listen to the San Francisco Giants get their home win in their new ballpark (2-1 over the Expos) on the way up, and the Oakland A's overcome a dominant performance by Minnesota Twins pitcher Eric Milton, winning 6-2 in 10 innings, on the way back.

We're having a pretty warm, sunny weekend, with highs over 80 in the Valley where I live. But it was in the low 60s and windy on the coast, making me wish I'd brought my jacket. On the way there I bought a couple of beach chairs at Target (why a couple? Foresight, in the event that I do this again with somebody), and regretted not bringing the beach blanket I got at a Giants game last week.

The fruit and veggie stand that I always stop at when I go to Moss Beach was closed, presumably it's not yet the right season. But I went to the beach, took some photos (below), and spent a while sitting in my new chair on the sand, reading a magazine and my next Iain M. Banks book (Excession, which so far reminds me in many ways of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep).

	A pipe empties some runoffs into this gulley, which runs down to the ocean. There's a sign further down saying that this water is not safe for swimming in (not that there's enough to actually swim in!), but otherwise it's pretty innocuous. There used to be a bridge running over the gulley straight ahead which led to a pedestrian path along the bluffs over the beach, but the bridge apparently broke and has not been replaced. I think you can get to the path at the other end - about two miles away - but I haven't gone looking yet.
	A beautiful kitty-cat was walking around in the grass along the fence you can see in the previous picture. Here he is lounging below the fence. I was at the beach for a couple of hours and he was in the general area the whole time. Well-fed, I presume he belongs to a nearby resident. Hard to imagine a better life for a kitty-cat than prowling a nearby beach! He was friendly but not outgoing.
	Peculiar yellow flowers in the field just above the beach, the runoff stream is to the left. You can see the rocks of the tide pools straight ahead.
	The tide pools. We're about 2 hours after low tide here, so there aren't many "pools". The far rocks are clearly a natural breakwater.
	The bluffs overlooking the beach. You can see a fence up above which I think marks the pedestrian path. I spent over an hour sitting in a chair pretty much straight ahead, reading.
	The expanse of the beach, looking south. There's a buoy in the distance that you can barely see. I've walks about as far as you can see in this photo, but after a while the ocean runs right up to the bluffs and you have to turn back.

It was a pretty good time. Not optimal, but I'm always looking for ways to fill time on the weekend, since I don't like hanging around my apartment if I can help it.

I called Lucy in the early evening to ask if she'd like to go to Borrone. She says it'll take her about half an hour to get from her new house to Borrone, which is not ridiculous, but she's unlikely to come if she doesn't have some time to prepare (have dinner, etc., ahead of time), which she didn't today. Not surprising since she and John are still unpacking, but it was nice to talk to her for a while.

I spent the evening reading at Borrone, and I'm also gearing up to write an SF story, and spent a little time outlining some details of the story's background. I always find names difficult to come up with, and doubly so since Iain Banks' character and ship names in the books I'm reading by him right now are so exotic and alluring. Oh, well.

This story has the potential to be fairly long, possibly even a novel. I don't really know, but I do know it's not going to be a 7,000-word short story. I'm trying not to be intimidated by that, but to actually start it and make progress on it and make it interesting, which has always been my biggest obstacle to writing: Actually writing. It's been several years since I've made a go of it, and I've never actually submitted anything to a magazine or an editor. So, we'll see.

(Now you know why I never talk about my writing despite occasional mentions of it elsewhere on my Web site; there hasn't been very much of it for a while.)