Fog

   We've had some summer-type days here in San Francisco, where the temperature reached around seventy degrees, and the skies were pretty clear, on some days in the morning time, when the marine layer usually dominates. 

   Even though I've now lived here more than nine years, I still tend to forget that there are warmer clear days at all. My wife and I reside closer to the Pacific Ocean, in the north midwestern part of the city, we are more vulnerable to the chilling winds and moisture that it tends to help form. It still is odd for me to be out in the morning and witness clear, blue skies, when those don't usually appear until mid afternoon, if at all.

   So after a few clearer days where the temperature thirty miles east reached one hundred, the fog has returned to my neighborhood, and this morning it was dense and beautiful. The fog blankets the landscape with a blue-gray light that is thick and moist. When I am out in nature, I tend to prefer it to the light of brilliant sunshine.

Welcome back

Claw

   This is a picture that I took some days ago in Golden Gate park, near Stow Lake. It is the claw of what I believe to be a crawdaddy, who has met an untimely death, probably at the hands of another animal (most likely a pelican). There it was, in the middle of the walking path, looking strange being dismebered from the rest of the small body it had come from, The rest of the body was nowhere to be found, and was possinly mostly being digested at that very moment.
   At first, I was saddened by the this sight, because although I had previously seen this creature in the mouth of pelicans, seeing the severed claw seemed more disturbing to me, till I realized that its' death provided food for another animal, and seeing this image was really only a visual manifestation of an occurence which I trust happens often and regularly at this location. In a way, it gave me hope by reminding me that the world is such an organic place, that life ebbs and flows, begins and ends, with or without me.