The plan for this morning was pretty much to chill out. Watch a movie on tv, drink lots of tea, relax my poor, lame calf muscles (lame!) and then drag my ass out of bed around noon to have lunch with Kirke (a belated birthday lunch). Well, the chilling out part of the plan went to shit: I woke up early and flung myself out of bed, threw my bike into the back of my car, grabbed my camera, and off I went. No chilling out for this chick.
I had to inflate my bicycle tires, and stopped at the gas station up the street. A nice man had just pulled up near the air and water pumps, and while he used the water, I used the air. We immediately started talking about blogs and photos. His name is Scott, he is a photographer who recently started a photo blog, and he was off to Huntington Beach on a photo adventure. I myself was, in fact, going on a photo adventure. Though I suspect mine was less adventurous than his, as I planned to be back by 11am. Here is Scott's photo blog. It's a pretty new blog, so please check it out, it's always good to have support on new projects like this.
So, after having a quick chat with my fellow blogger and after successfully inflating my bike's tires (and by successfully, I mean I didn't blow them up), off I went.
Keep in mind that the reason(s) I was planning to chill today was that (a) my left calf was sore, and I got a bit of Achilles tendinitis going on in the right ankle (old injury, flared up because I was compensating for the left calf - sigh...), (b) yesterday I did 3 hours of yoga (count 'em -- three!), because I took a hip opener workshop. Given the recent hip uncertainties (god, I'm falling apart), I thought it would be good to just ... rest this morning.
Hah.
Instead of resting, I spent 2 hours biking on the beach, taking photos of a few of the recently painted lifeguard stations all along the coast. This is a huge public arts project that will be up from May to October, and spans 30 miles of beach across LA County. The project is called Summer of Color. All my photos were taken from the bike path, and you can see lots more photos at the official project website, and you can get more info about Projects of Hope here. I don't know about you, but I totally dig public art projects.
However, if you want to see my pictures, you can go to my Flickr set, Summer of Color 2010. Below are just a couple.
The lifeguards in LA County are not just teenagers who have summer jobs: the lifeguards are a division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, not to be confused with the Los Angeles Fire Department, which serves the City of Los Angeles.
If you're worried about the health of my calves, well, don't be, I was biking very slowly. That, of course, is because I had to keep my eyes open for good photo ops, not because I'm useless. I mean, I am a bit useless, but I was cruising at a snail's pace today, even slower than usual. It is worth noting that at one point I was biking happily away, and noticed that there was a guy running past me. Ok, fine, he was jogging past me. I thought that was a bit much, so I sped up to keep up with him for a few hundred feet. Then I decided I should lie in the sun for a bit, and let him "speed" on ahead.
I won't be doing an ironman any time soon, but I hope you like the pics.
