Sunday, December 13

Went to the beach this morning for our Sunday walk, and it is surprising how many people are swimming at 7:00am. It seems like most people go ocean swimming, and it's mandatory that kids learn how to swim. Bill went in briefly and said the water was cold but refreshing, especially since the temp is supposed to get up to 108 degrees today. It's a bit disconcerting to see the helicopters making their runs over the beach, they're the shark patrol and the water is clear enough for the sharks to be spotted easily. They closed our local beach last weekend because of a shark sighting, but it was reopened fairly quickly.

Went to the farmers market yesterday that is run by Asians, and they were playing a tape of Christmas carols, which lapsed into Chinese off an on. I noticed that they intermingled the words from one carol into another, while continuing to sing to the tune of the first song. Interesting.

I overheard a couple talking and since they sounded American, I just had to go over and ask if they were from the US. They were here visiting relatives and said they used to live in Carpenteria and the woman worked in Camarillo, before they moved up to northern California. Truly a small world.

One good thing about knowing that pedestrians do NOT have the right of way here, is that there is no wondering if the cars might stop for you, you know for certain they will not, so it's up to you to get out of the way. Luckily the streets around here are quite narrow, so everybody just runs across whenever they can, regardless of the stop lights, and no one ever gets a jaywalking ticket.