I’m in Monterey today and went down to the beach with my high school friend Zhenya. I wish I had brought my camera, because the beach was full of life:

• hundreds of little crab legs everywhere, and some dismembered crab thoraxes (thoraces, thoraxi?) here and there. It’s a bit creepy to have legs wash over your feet all the time
• lots of little trilobite-like mollusks and shrimps, washed up and crushed
• a flock of a thousand black birds which we couldn’t identify. They fly very low to the water and don’t dive in from the air to get their food; they swim around in the ocean like ducks and dive down.
• these cute birds with long beaks that pecked at the wet sand and then skittered off as the waves came in. They were super-cute.
• ladybugs desperately trying to escape the salt water waves, with limited success. I’m not sure why there were ladybugs on the beach at all, actually. Perhaps they were having a ladybug picnic.

The sun was warm and the ocean was cool. The beach rules.