Rock on, alfalfa.

I love my body. I don’t mean that in the egotistical, YE-OWW sort of way-- I don’t think I’m that hot. But I do love the feeling of being. I’ve been putting on a teensy bit of muscle, and it feels great. I can completely understand why people get addicted to body-building. This feeling of being stronger is amazingly heady, especially in my legs.

I’m riding in the car right this second, on my way to the museum (no, I’m not driving) and the clouds are really pretty. The weather has been pretty wild for the last couple days, and our hills, which are normally just a flat, sun-burnt yellow have become a softly beautiful grey-green yellow, and the normally dull and dusty bushes have become a much more lively green. Funny-- we didn’t see the burros.

There’s something wonderful about the huge boulders that stick up out of the ground here. I don’t know why I like them so much, but I do.

I was eating lunch with a very nice lady at school the other day, and I went to refill my water bottle out of the drinking fountain, and she mentioned to me that the water in this area has a lot more lime in it than most places. I told her that it made sense because this whole area used to be underwater, and I might just be overly sensitive, but I think she gave me an odd look.

My dad loves to “rock hound,” or search for rocks, and I have been known to go with him. Once, we were digging through some soft sediment near a freeway off ramp, and a police officer pulled over to ask what we were doing. His hand hovered near his gun until my dad handed me the pickax, and he didn’t believe our story until we showed him the fossil mollusks we had found.

I think prickly pear cacti are really cool. In fact, most cacti are neat. Succulents in general, they’re fascinating. Actually, I find all of the adaptations that plants and animals make to dry climates very interesting. What’s really kind of cool is that in the areas where there really is very little precipitation, the plants tend to be the kind that store water somewhere, so I wonder if that’s part of what animals are able to eat just those plants and get enough water? Food for thought, anyway.

I think if I were going to be a mythical sea monster, I’d have to pick the kraken, and probably just because of the cool name. When I was little, I had this book of monsters that had the most beautiful illustrations. They were like collages, and were less than hyper-realistic. Some of the monsters even had paisley patterns. I must have read that book a hundred and fifty times.

I like how dense orange trees are. I had a dream last night where I was flying around, over all of this farm land, but the strange thing was that the things I was flying over really shouldn’t all have been growing in the same area, unless I’m totally crazy. There were normal crops like oranges and avocados, but there was also alfalfa (which I wouldn’t recognize in reality) and corn, and probably a whole lot of other stuff whin I recognized in my dreams but wouldn’t awake.

We just passed a sparrow harassing a crow. I wonder who the crow was molesting to get that sort of reaction out of such a little bird. Perhaps the sparrow was just attempting a preemptive strike, though.