Nature

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Ocean Beach: the Edge of the World

Ocean Beach from Sutro Heights

Ocean Beach, as seen from Sutro Heights

It’s exactly two miles from my house to Ocean Beach (my Strava app tells me so). Every weekend I make the short run, ending up at the north end of the Great Highway near the Cliff House (today I beat my record: 9-minute miles – hurray! A special thank-you to my running partners, stress and angst).

Grafitti wall

The wall, looking northeast.

Ocean Beach wall

The wall, looking northwest to the Cliff House.

Ocean Beach is not initially beautiful. At least it wasn’t to me, the girl who grew up in Hawaii. There’s a huge, graffiti-covered (only on one side, thankfully) concrete wall that spans the entire length of the beach. It’s supposed to keep sand dunes from piling up on the Great Highway. Still, every summer the highway shuts down for the annual sand removal, a project that moves approximately 7,000 to 10,000 cubic yards of sand (source: SFGate).

oceanbeach.cliffhouse

Another view of the Cliff House.

oceanbeach.crows

oceanbeach.surfer

Even without the eyesore, there’s the weather. The beach is cloudy or foggy or cold or windy or all of the above 360 days of the year. But… like everything else in this town, it’s grown on me. I love how vast it feels, how uncrowded (when it’s a nice day, you know it. Everyone flocks to the beach), how rugged, even how grey (I mean, crashing waves at the edge of the world are pretty amazing, whether the sun is shining on them or not).

oceanbeach.beerbottlesI’m beginning to think San Francisco can make anything beautiful. The old homeless man sitting on a park bench I passed this morning. The abandoned beer bottles I found last week. Maybe my stress level is so high that I’m not thinking clearly (I think I AM a tad delusional right now, let’s be honest). But I think more than that, I just want to love my town as much as I can in these last couple of weeks.

oceanbeach.blue

One of the lessons that San Francisco has taught me (and it’s taught me many) is to look beyond. To look beyond myself, to look beyond first impressions, beyond stereotypes, beyond the hype…to look beyond the concrete wall and the fog, to find the beautiful crashing waves of Ocean Beach.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

inside

Inside one of the stairways on the Batteries to Bluffs trail.

San Francisco, California.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Perspective

ggbridgesmall.blog

Okay, y’all. I’m doing it. The Weekly Photo Challenge. For those of my non-blogging Followers (and I have a bunch – love you guys!), the challenge is announced by WordPress (the host of my blog) each Friday. The purpose of the challenge is to spark creativity, but it also gives us the opportunity to see others’ interpretations of the theme.

SO… because I can’t help myself and because I have nothing better to do (like maybe pack up a house in less than a month and no, I haven’t started)…basically, because I am out of my mind crazy, I’ve decided to play. I’d never call myself a photographer and don’t have any other camera except my iPhone (wish), but what I love about this game is that there’s no right answer and anyone can play.

Above is a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. And below, the original photo. I took it several months ago while hanging out with the girls at San Francisco’s Baker Beach.

ggbridgesmall2.blog

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Family + Telling the Girls + Bugs

Family portrait

Spring 2012

I haven’t talked about my family a whole lot yet, but family is pretty much the whole reason for the move. This is probably my favorite photo of my three loves. My husband (who is the most private person I know – bless his heart for not collapsing when I told him about the blog) was being silly with the girls one morning and I captured this sweet moment. Lucy was about six months old and Penny had just turned three.

Speaking of the girls, we finally told them about the move last night. The first words out of Penny’s mouth were, “I’m not really that excited because I don’t like walking in Michigan….they have worms!” Not the response we were expecting, exactly, although it wasn’t entirely out of left field. Last summer when we were there, Penny was freaked out by all the bugs.

In the backyard

In the backyard. (No bugs.)

To her credit, they were kind of creepy, especially when they crawled up from the dirt and onto the hot stones of Nana’s deck or concrete sidewalks of the neighborhood. They would writhe around, flipping and flopping, and if they couldn’t find their way back to the earth, they would eventually shrivel up and die. There were also lots of beetles and bees and other flying insects. We rarely see bugs here, even in our backyard.

I feel her pain. Bugs make ms jumpy, too. My gross-out Michigan bug moment was during my early evening runs. Every couple of blocks, I would run through a swarm cloud of tiny bugs in a funnel formation (what were they doing? And what kind of bugs were they? I would Google it, but then I’d have to look at buggy photos). Every once in a while I would inhale one. I got to where I could spot them up ahead, and whenever I reached a swarm, I would flail my arms in an attempt to keep any bugs from entering my nose or mouth. Sometimes I’d let out a battle cry while doing it. Preeetty sure the locals could tell I wasn’t from around there.

Penny and I have some manning up to do, for sure (she’s been talking about worms all morning), especially since I plan on composting and planting an edible garden. I’ll let you know how it goes down.

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San Francisco Weather Report: Cherry Blossoms Confused

cherry blossoms

If you haven’t already heard, California is in a drought. We’ve had unseasonably dry, warm weather this winter, and it’s confusing the plants. Cherry blossoms, which usually bloom in early spring, have arrived in full force. They are everywhere and they are beautiful. But I’m afraid they won’t last. The sun was nowhere to be seen today and it’s supposed to be more of the same this week.

cherry blossoms against a blue house

Michigan is known for their cherries. Traverse City in Northern Michigan boasts over 2.6 million cherry trees. And someday I want to drive up there just to see the miles and miles of orchard trees in bloom. I have no doubt it’s a sight to ooh and ahh over.

But there’s something special about seeing them in the City. There’s a wonderful element of surprise…their bright pink flowers against vivid Victorian colors or dull concrete buildings… it’s pretty magical.

And it’s little things like this that I don’t realize I’m going to miss until I come face to face with them. It seems like every other day I find something new. It’s bittersweet. I love that there are so many great things about this city and I love that I’m grateful for all of them. Of course it will make leaving that much harder, but better to have loved, as they say.

cherry blossoms against a blue roof