this is as close as i could get to the right color

[click image]

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The Pacific Ocean was gonna-kill-ya stop gorgeous today. I couldn't stop. But it was a mind blower. I don't know how to describe how you should fix this in your mind to get the perfect vision of it, but try blasting some sidelong sunshine on it and get it kinda shimmery and you should be as close as we can possibly go. It was the darkest of teal on the tending-to-blue side and only going vaguely greener nearest the shore. The whitecaps had been to the dentist for one of those laser whitening jobs or something. I can't see so good, see? So when I tell you it was this outrageously gorgeous and clear and intense, THINK how much the more so it would have been for a sighted person! Holy bat guano. To. Die. For.

No. Really.

It would've been just fine to drive off a cliff into it. It would've been cosmic. Rad. The only way to fly.

I thought it was gonna be over when I had to head inland north of Westport over the Coast Range to hit 101, and I almost just turned around to grab Peggy and Jim and sit out there and STARE at it till we all died of starvation or peed our pants, but I kept driving like a good girl who does what she's supposed to. There were clods of snow by the sides of the highway up at the summit. So then I hit 101 and saw the Eel and the Mattole are teal too, but not as neonly teal yet. THAT comes later in the spring. The redwoods were in fine shape and when I finally got to the ocean again—I'll be damned—it was still that shocking teal. Soon, though the overcast made it just gray. It's ALWAYS overcast around Eureka. But then the sun was back out north of Eureka and the ocean electric teal with RAINBOWS everywhere. This didn't last that long because the sun was going too far down. What came next was a sort of matte-looking polished silver ocean with just the faintest hint of baby blue to it. THAT looked like it had to be Tiamat reborn. It looked like something in a science fiction masterpiece. Then the road started me back up the coastal mountainside and some more clods of snow, and the Trinity Alps off in the distance were totally white, so I took the Newton P. Drury Scenic Parkway to miss what I was positive was going to be icy freeway up there on the new bypass over the summit. STILL, when connecting back onto 101 much lower down than the summit, more clods of snow by the side of the road.

They told me at the grocery store it's supposed to snow again tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I think we are close enough to tomorrow already because I'm gonna have to cave on my all-doors-and-windows-open-to-the-elements-thumb-my-nose-at-the-power-company gig. My fingertips are ten little ice cubes already....

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love, 99
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