Way, way up high in one of our canyons, right where the crumbling asphalt gives way to a tooth-jolting washboard of packed dirt, someone sprayed this warning on an open grate.

Seems to me this message could apply to any road or street or lane or grate or culvert anywhere and everywhere in L.A. because eventually, everything does drain to the sea.

Have I mentioned lately that we're living in controlled chaos with the contents of the closet spread around the dining room, the kitchen filled with boxes of tile, and the bed crammed into the study where two dogs now spend their time making sure the contractor knows they're available for patting?

Yesterday, amid all that fog (which, after a bright and lovely start this morning, is wafting back inland from the ocean) we saw more story poles, which means another house, which means more landscaping, which means more fences and tall walls, which means adios to even more open space.

Sigh.

And so it's here, the autumn fog, wrapped tight around the coast. It presses on the window panes, drips from the eaves, sends scented tendrils, salty sweet, through keyholes.

We wake to the cool, gray dawn, shiver into sweaters, climb into the hills to catch a glimpse of sun.

Then it's back into the soup, to the moody gloom, to November at the beach.

One of our neighbors here in the Cove is the drummer for a famous band and since he's on tour all the time, his deck tends to go native. You'll see a squirrel squatting on the roof, birds nesting in the arbor, a stray cat asleep on the stairs. And on Halloween morning there was this spider, as big as a golf ball, quivering in the midst of an enormous web. It waved as I got the shot, then settled in to wait for the mailman.

It's 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning at our local Starbucks, though it feels a lot like 8 seeing as how Daylight Saving (* that's Saving and not Savings, as I've been saying ever since I learned to speak English) Time is over and we've gained back that hour someone borrowed last spring. It's definitely the day after Halloween, though, and everyone's talking, about the various doings and dramas of their evenings, about tricks played and costumes worn, about plans for an even bigger bash next year.

So I'm doing the Sunday crossword in the NYT when suddenly the sound level takes a dip and there's this pair of shoes, third-date shoes, morning-after shoes, these-come-off-last shoes.

And then the line moves on and there's the dad and his kids:

And a tourist:

And a Malibu mom:

But it's the shoes that aren't headed for CostCo later on, the shoes that won't be running laps or running errands, those are the shoes that have everyone in the place thinking...something.

I know, I know, another sunrise? But look how pretty, how calm and lovely. It would be just plain wrong to let these pixels lie fallow.

A friend (Hi Diana!) and I were in Chinatown a few weeks back, lost in the maze of an indoor shopping bazaar, when we saw this emphatic sign about the price of these baby blankets. OK?

Hot dog.

Thirsty dog.

Happy dog.

Things are always flying off the golf carts that, present company excepted, people use to reach the beach here in Paradise Cove. Towels, trowels, bits of surf gear, t-shirts, sunscreen and the occasional bikini bottom have been left by the side of the road. And often enough, here's where they end up, on this concrete wall, our unofficial (and not always efficient) lost and found.