bardsmaid's ongoing photo diary


9-05-02 Of passing storms and raindrops
I was sitting out in the front yard last night, finishing up a reading lesson with a friend of Aaron's who I'm currently tutoring, when the light began to be tinted with the most wonderful clear yellow. When we looked up, the clouds you see below were drifting toward us, and then large, soft drops began to fall. We haven't had any rain for over 170 days, and last year's total rainfall was less than five inches, so though this incident only lasted a few minutes, I enjoyed every cool drop and the wonderful lingering smell of first rain on dry, dusty ground.
Living on a driveway behind several other houses, I'm very lucky to have this view as I look out the front door. The trees in silhouette are avocados.	Detail of the clouds. The underside of the cloud layer just seemed to be dissolving, like quilt batting loosening and falling away.
	The rain was caused by a dying tropical storm coming to us from off the coast of Mexico. It also caused high swells along the coast, and wispy cloud layers, so this morning I went out to Sycamore Cove to check out the surf. This picture was taken from Mugu Rock, a landmark you may have seen in TV commercials. (There's an older Volkswagen Jetta commercial that features the rock--the one where the bunch of twenty-somethings who spend their days writing computer code take a break by going out for a drive.) Several times I've seen movie crews set up at this location.
I was lucky enough to catch a group of pelicans coming down to glide just above the surface of the water. Sometimes they come in groups of up to twenty or more, flying single-file just above the waves, looking for all the world like small planes in a reconnaissance patrol.
Moody shoreline of Sycamore Cove. The tiny, pale 'bump' in the background just at the shoreline is Mugu Rock where the picture above was taken.	A lone black gull stands its ground against incoming swells of wind-whipped foam. I loved watching the quickly-changing patterns of the foamy water.
Detail of a curling wave. Overcast skies tend to give the water a delicate emerald tint.
	I was struck, both on the way to the coast and coming home, by how many fields are lying fallow (at least temporarily) right now, such as this one near the CSUCI campus. The corn crop in the first picture from the 8-23 update was gone and the fields disked up. In some places a new crop, perhaps pale young celery transplants, has already been set in. Aside from the sod fields, the one large crop that remained unharvested was a several-acre plot of chilis.