Point Reyes

Yesterday Erik and I spent at Point Reyes National Seashore. We drove the two hours to the visitor's center and got our park map there. A park worker was speaking to some tourists in German, which impressed me.

First we stopped at North Beach. There I sat in the sand and did some editing of the manuscript I've been working on. It was very cloudy out, windy and cold, and we were bundled up. The beach was beautiful. The waves were huge and turbulent.

Then we went to the lighthouse. Here Erik and I split up for an hour. I dislike lighthouses! so he went to visit the lighthouse on his own. I stayed in the car, finished my editing, and worked on a letter to my friend A in Hillsboro. I was very happy.

Then we went to visit the elephant seals. Unfortunately, there were only a handful we could see, and they were kind of far away, and they weren't doing anything. Well, we heard one big male making strange sounds from inside his throat. That was kind of cool.

By then it was getting colder and kind of dark. We went to South Beach and walked. Then we sat on a log and I stared out at the water. Erik was looking at things on the sand and showed them to me and asked me questions about them--seaweed, broken sand dollars, a crab's shell, mussel shells, what I would have called an oyster shell, when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if it's actually an oyster shell.

It was fun. The whole day was fun. I'm not mentioning the drives between locations: beautiful green hills. Pt Reyes is dotted with historic ranches, so there were a lot of cows. My favorite moment of the whole day was when we were stopped by the side of the road watching a cow munch grass. She was sticking her head and neck through the barbed wire fence to get at the grass by the roadside. She was using her big tongue to get at the grass. I love cows a lot, more than I like deer, even more than I like elk (though we didn't see any elk yesterday--we didn't drive north enough to the elk area).

We stopped for dinner at an Indian place in Fairfax called The Lotus Cafe, and our food was delicious. The restaurant was very small, but I didn't get too freaked out by that. I got a mango lassi, which is a real treat. Then we went to a natural foods store down the street called The Good Earth and bought some wonderful things. For example, I got a roll of organic mints that are kind of like Certs, and I used to love Certs.

I'm done with the editing work, but I'm worried I didn't do a thorough enough job. All the proofreading is good, but some of the paragraphs are awfully clunky, and I'm afraid I need to fix them in a way I don't know how. I'm also worried about how few pages I got done in those two hours. I don't think P realizes how long it takes me. Anyway, I need to call him.

Tomorrow Erik starts a one week in person job, and also SAT scoring starts Thursday, so today is our last free day together for a couple weeks. There's a lot to do.