A Lovely Day For It

Yesterday I joined a few new friends at the regularly held beach clean-up. I'm not usually up and out so early on a weekend, but it was a beautiful morning.

With pelicans.

And distant views.

And close-ups of water and sand.

And this oddball bird, doing a version of the cat-loaf.

(Thanks, Mary Ellen!I wanted to zoom in on him, but I'm trying to use Google Photos and editing won't work for me. It says I can edit it, and lets me zoom in, but when I hit Done, it reverts to the original. Any ideas on getting that to work?)

Beach clean-ups give me mixed emotions. It's nice that there are people willing to clean up after others, but it's sad that there are so many people who don't clean up after themselves. One can charitably imagine the wind grabbing that string-cheese wrapper, the child burying a toy, or a hair tie jumping away and not being found again. It's also entirely possible that people just didn't bother to pick up after themselves, or just don't care, which is aggravating.

But at least it might not have been intentional. I can't come up with a single charitable possibility for cigarette butts. You don't leave those behind unawares. Come on, smokers: this is a beach, not an ashtray.