Venice Beach

We drove north to LA yesterday on a super sunny day. With my new eyes (sans cataracts) the lush California landscape is so exquisite, I can't keep my eyes off it. The boats, the ocean, the shiny cars, the hills, the fruit trees, the Mexican paint colors of naranjas and lavendar -- this state is like a big candy-stuffed pinata I'm wacking open to see more and more sweets and treats inside. I've never seen a California like this.

At Venice Beach, we hooked up with my sister at her Dean booth on the beach. She's expertly positioned next to a sexy 4-man band playing salsa and jazz -- they sound so good I have to wonder if they were session musicians dressed down for the beach -- studio refugees. The ocean was wavy and wild, hosting three daring parasailors, their half moon shaped sails, blown full bore, nearly exploding full of a choppy hard wind, surfing at wreckless speeds, and doing fantastic flips a good 20 feet high into the air, crashing down into waves but landking lightly and skateboarding along, through water like it was a friendly sidewalk. On the boardwalk all the characters are there, rollergirls, rastamans, henna tatooists and insense vendors. The wind was blowing all our Dean brochures away, but we weighed them down with rocks. Rowdy teenagers skate by and yell "Vote Edwards!" at me as if this will un-Dean me. I yell back at them , "Hey, just VOTE!"

We ended a long day at the Reel Inn on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, sipping a sunset, then watching the diamondy coast show off a necklace of lights stretching to Palos Verdes, the Santa Monica pier ferris wheel pulsing and bright like a shiny button.