MONTEREY

Hello everyone,

How are you all today? I'm doing fine.

Monterey is a beautiful city.  There's this one building that I drive by quite often when I'm downtown.  It is heavily decorated.  I'm not sure how old the building is. My first thought is that it was built in the 1920s or 1930s based on some of the design features.

There is a flower shop on the ground floor that has been there since the building opened. Hmm...that's a thought. I should walk into the flower shop and ask the owner. 

Here's a photo of the building from the outside. It has some amazing detail and I LOVE the fact that the main entrance to the building is on the corner. You don't see that kind of detail much anymore:

The flower shop is called "Flor Monterey".  In any case, I'll make sure and get some more photos of this building sometime this week or next week.  It has so many interesting details.


There was a controlled burn out at Fort Ord yesterday and then again this morning. Here are a couple of pictures that I took with my mobile phone camera.  It looked a lot scarier than it really was, but I figure that as long as that smoke is not shaped like a mushroom, we're doing fairly well :)

The first pic was taken around 9:47 a.m. this morning from the Whole Foods parking lot. The controlled burn had just started at 9:30 a.m.

This next photo was just over an hour later. It was taken from my front yard. By this time the smoke was quite thick and it even covered up the sun. However, it didn't last long. It's 1:20 p.m. now and most of it is clearing away thanks to the wind.

I actually have today off from work. So I stopped by my hairstylist's salon to get my bangs trimmed. They were getting kind of long and I just can't make up my mind about whether to keep them short or grow them out long.  In any case,  I had my mobile phone with me and snapped a couple photos.  There is beauty all around if we can only learn to keep our eyes open for it.

I really like bougainvillea. It's a beautiful plant that grows very well here in the Monterey Bay peninsula area. I just loved how this particular bougainvillea was growing up around the slats on this balcony railing.

I also love vintage antiques, including trucks. I usually see this beautiful Ford truck at a local carwash. Today it was parked downtown.  This is my dream car, for real :) :) I so would love to drive something like this.

I also went to Trader Joe's to buy some cheddar cheese. I have a leftover bag of gluten-free tortilla chips that I purchased at TJ's yesterday. Then the idea came to me to make easy peasy nachos. So on the way to the store, I stopped to get a photo of this beautiful iris. This is another flower that I see a lot around this area.

Oh, and in my backyard, we have quite a few different varieties of trees from Spanish oak to a very tall Redwood tree.  Well, a few weeks ago, one of the trunks on the Spanish oak just fell over. It just missed the house by a few inches. Thankfully there was no damage. One of our neighbor's was really kind and helped us chop up the trunk. Most of the wood has gone to the yard waste recycle bin. This is what it looks like now. Thankfully the rest of the tree is solid :)

That's about it for now.  I hope you all are enjoying your Tuesday.  That's the news  from the ocean shores of California today. Love and hugs, Heather :)


THE OCEAN AND BEAUTIFUL SEA GLASS

Hi everyone,

How are you all today? I'm doing well.  I'll often answer "Better than I deserve".

One of the things that I like to do in my free time is search for sea glass. Sea glass is simply broken shards of glass that have been worn smooth of the course of many, many years by the ocean waves.  It's like finding little gemstones in the sand. It really is fun to search for these tiny treasures.

Here is what I found one day back in September. I went to one of the local beaches here in Monterey. This is what I came back home with:

These little bits of sea glass are often times smaller than my pinky nail. The biggest and rarest piece that I found was the size of my thumb nail. It's the very light aqua piece of glass that is to the left of that tiny piece of brown sea glass. Aqua glass is rare to find. 


I love aqua as a color.  When I went searching for sea glass this particular day, it was already afternoon and most of the good sea glass has already been picked over. However, I think God meant for me to find this piece to let me know that He cares about every detail of my life, even the small things :) 


Here's a close-up of what I collected:

The white, green and brown sea glass is quite common to find.  Every once in awhile I do find aqua sea glass. I'm still on the hunt for the extremely rare pink sea glass. Some day. A girl can always hope and dream.

Much of the aqua sea glass comes from broken pieces of old blue Mason jars like the one pictured above.  I wonder what kind of stories those pieces of glass could tell me. It's a bit of a romantic notion, I suppose, but it's fun to imagine and to dream.

I'm storing all of my aqua sea glass in a small glass storage jar with a glass lid and metal latch hook system.  My collection is small, but it's worth waiting for.  Maybe I'll actually manage to fill this small jar one day.

Oh, and just as an added bonus, I took a photo of the bottom of this small glass storage jar. It's so CUTE. It says "WHEATON" in big bold letters up top...and below it in smaller much fainter letters it says "U.S.A".

I love the ocean. Truly, I can be happy anywhere, but I'm so thankful that I've got this time to live near the ocean shores. 

That's the news from the ocean shores of California today. Love and hugs to you all, Heather