On this day....

It happened this way.

Last Saturday evening, I felt as though I was coming down with a cold.  By Sunday morning, I knew I had one, my first in ages. Jeanne suggested  that I test for covid and decided to test herself as well.  Results?  I was negative.  Jeanne however, was positive.  

We shut down for the week.  Allie dropped off some bread, OJ and milk, contactless of course, and we settled into the routine.  Time passed...

It's a week later now (almost) and we're both fit as the proverbial fiddle, and negative once again. However, we missed two bus trips this week.  Trips which would have provided me with hundreds of pictures to use in posts. I was counting on some of those photos for today's edition.  What to do, what to do?  

Then, Jeanne pointed out that I had some pictures in the 'On This Day' feature that is part of my weather and news site. It was showing me pictures from a day we spent at the beach, five years ago. (How it gets into my files of pictures I don't know, but it does. Just another lesson about how, dare I say insidious, are the workings of the online world?)  Be that as it may, I do rather like to have my own historical pictures to look each day at so I'm not really complaining.  

She gave me the idea however, to do a post that looked back in time. Therefore, today we've going to look at sand on Birthday Beach. 

We are arriving at the beach in this shot. It's about a ten minute walk from the parking lot. The sand is plentiful hereabouts, and the road to the beach is deeply rutted.  Vehicles come this way as well and we pedestrians had to be cautious, they would need to travel at speed to push through the sand and make it over the final sand dune. You can see however in this photo that all the ruts are drifted. No vehicles had come recently and none did so while we walked out.  We had no problems whatsoever. 

A mostly overcast sky produces first, an interesting partial reflection on the beach, and to me anyway, a slight feeling of unreality. Almost as if I was looking at an impressionistic painting. This shot is something I would consider hanging on my living room wall, I like it that much. I like the way the sand dune extends to the vanishing point close to the center point of the picture.

I also have another, very similar photo.  I think I like the one above a little better, but the one below has its points.  Which do you prefer? 

Not the same I know, but I thought of the picture below, Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth, 1948, when I looked at my photograph. 

I said that we were going to look at sand.  Maybe that sounded strange, but let me explain. A lot of the sand on the western beaches in New Zealand was produced in volcanos ages ago. It's weathered pumice and is black in color.  On this beach, we'll see both light sand and this dark volcanic sand and amazingly, the types appear to stay separate.  I'll be showing you patterns of light and dark that astounded me.  

I imagine that the two sands have particles of different shapes and weights.  I know that much of the black sand is high in iron and therefore magnetic.  (Right, Dianne?) 

Look at the amazing patterns that the waves have created.  

Here and there I found shells that produced interesting patterns. 

Not too long ago, Jeanne and I watched an old Star Trek, Voyager, episode in which one of the ship's shuttlecrafts was leading the starship through a nebula, fraught with dangerous radiation, aliens, dark matter nodules, or maybe all three, I don't remember for sure. This tableau reminds me of one of the wide-angle shots shown of that caravan.   

This pattern is especially remarkable. Is that shell breaking the sound barrier?  

Now and then I came across jellyfish.  I love this one for the color it affords the otherwise dull background. 

The foam behind this shell adds to the pattern too.

Here's my last offering for today.  I hope that you've found these to be interesting.  I think that if I lived on that beach, and had all the time I wanted at my disposal, I might try my hand at  forming ridges and depressions in the sand and then recording what the waves would paint on 'our canvases.'  They have limited colors available on their palette, true, but infinite imagination.   

An ever-changing composition.    -djf