Reboot: Morning walk

Mika’s abrupt demise, and the cold I caught immediately after, threw me into a bit of a tailspin as far as blogging is concerned. There were all kinds of things I had intended to write about, but the change in my interior psyche brought that to a sudden halt. I’ve been wanting to get the blog going again, but I can’t go back and write about all the things I had originally intended, so I’ve decided just to jump to the present and write about today’s morning walk.

You may have seen on the news that there’s a bit of a heat wave happening out west, with the possible exception of the far northwest, which means that here on the coast we are getting what the rest of y’all would recognize as actual summer weather. I decided to walk out by the coast (“coast” is a relative term, I have discovered while living here), to be cooler, and headed out to the bunkers. . . . . .because I’ve been wanting to do that walk again before I leave and time’s is getting noticeably shorter. It’s a longish walk–this morning, it took about an hour and 45 minutes altogether–so even though it’s also a particularly nice one, I don’t do it all that often.

On the way out, we encountered this:

You may be thinking “Encountered what?” or “So what?”, but if you look carefully right in the middle you’ll see a bird with its tailfeathers up, giving its best impression of being wounded. There were a pair of them; they tracked us for quite a while. At one point, when CJ roamed a ways ahead, they split up and one followed her while the other quite literally kept its eye on me. I assume they have a nest of eggs or younguns somewhere in the vicinity. I hope they weren’t too disturbed–the performance was entertaining, and not even CJ was seriously interested in going after them.

We walked all the way out to the last bunker (there are a dozen or so) and up to the top of the cliff to survey the scene. When I turned around, I spotted a red patch, so went over to see what it was:

and squatted down to get a better shot:

When I turned around, I had a different perspective on the area, one I’d ever had out there before, having been tempted to a new spot by the above whatever-it-is.

It’s amazing what just a slight elevation and change of angle will do for a scene. You might have to see the photo full-size to get the full effect, but for me it was nice to realize there could be new experiences on a familiar walk even after all these years. Not all is nostalgia.

We headed back from there, pretty much going back the way we came. I thought about going down to the beach and taking it partway back, but there was a sign on the beach that, though I couldn’t read it, made me wonder if it’s plover breeding season (I even wondered if the pair of birds we had encountered earlier were perhaps plovers–I have no idea one way or the other*), and even I, maverick that I am, will obey the rules for that, so turned around and took the inland route back. Altogether a most excellent walk.

* So I went to google images and checked out plovers. There seem to be a huge variety of them, and I still can’t be sure either way. The markings I can remember on the birds I saw seemed similar to but different from the pics posted in google, and more sharply defined than a lot of them. But they could have been plovers–I know the ones that breed around here are a protected variety, so maybe they do have their own unique appearance. If bird calls went along with the pictures, I could tell you for sure.