Still Hanging Out in California

Starbucks, downtown Los Angeles January 2014
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I'm the sort of person who thinks you should get good use out of something before discarding or replacing it. I've had my (now) former laptop for almost ten years. It's still works fine, but it needs a new battery and some might argue that it has become a security risk. A trusted family member has convinced me to get a new one.
That's the first part of the story. The second part is this- I've been using digital cameras for over twenty years and in all that time, I haven't done a major overhaul of my archive. I have attempted it on a couple of occasions in the past few years but each time the effort loses momentum and I let it go again.
For now, this new machine seems to be working wonders on my ambition and attitude. I'll take advantage as long as it last. :-)
I found this yesterday. It was taken on the Embarcadero in San Francisco in 2009.

This past July we decided to head down the coast. We hadn’t been to Santa Cruz in years since we’d been getting our need for beach satisfied in San Francisco at Ocean beach. It was also a magical mystery tour through the Bay Area suburbs and exurbs. We took the 680 freeway south and then around the bottom of San Francisco Bay, past San Jose and Silicon Valley, over the Santa Cruz mountains and down to the sea.
When we got there, it was much quieter than we expected. It was the middle of the week, but it was also July. We expected to see more vacationers. Pacific Avenue, the main shopping street was also a lot more peaceful than usual.
Regardless of the mid week lull, the surfers were still enjoying their bit of the ocean. (That little black line above the surfer on the left is an otter.)

For the trip back, we decided to take Hwy 1, back up to the coast. At most of the state beaches we passed, there were lots of people enjoying the late afternoon. Finally we went through the southern suburbs and right up through San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
One section of Hwy 1, next to the town of Pacifica, used to scare the hell out of me. The road was cut into a cliff, no guard rail, then a drop off of hundreds of feet into the ocean below. That road looked raw, like it had just been constructed yesterday. Which was often the case because bits of it would regularly fall into the sea. Finally then decided it was too expensive to maintain like that so they decided to do this-

Yes, this is the loveliest tunnel I have ever seen! :-) Instead of trying to maintain the road on the side of the mountain, they decided to bore through it. Well done CalTrans!

I was recently reminded that in August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency of the United States of America. Even though we were grateful for his departure, it was still shocking. (His vice president had beeen run out of office for serious crimes also) I mean, we would never see something this bad again, right? In the past few days we have learned from news reports that the man who left he White House in 2020, may have committed one of the worst breaches of security in the history of this country. We don’t know and may never know how far this extends. Who among this country’s allies have also been compromised by this? In the meantime, we’ve been getting ample proof that the Republican party considers partisan politics above the rule of law. They seem to think that if they threaten to tear the country apart, the rest of us are going to back down and let them get away with this shit. To paraphrase the Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.

And now for something completely different- Mono Lake in October of 2014 or 15, I've lost track.

July was a bit dull. There were no bike races on July 4th, this picture is from 2006, but we did have fireworks. No major fires in the state though there were some small ones worryingly near Yosemite. This is a good kind of dull. Right now there is something bigger on the Oregon border so maybe we’re in for the bad kind of interesting in August.