The rainy season is so short and the colors are so beautiful that it's pretty much impossible to resist the urge to capture every last bit of it.

This one's from the mid-1940s, although some collectors on eBay are claiming that, due to the white border on the postcard, it can't be older than 1930. What I love are the wheeled wicker baskets provided to shoppers, and those gigantic watermelons, the kind with real flavor. (OK, and seeds.) Also interesting is the 'Dick Whittington' designation, which refers to a commercial photo studio that chronicled Los Angeles from 1924 to 1987. According to the USC web site, half a million negatives remain, about 40,000 of which have been digitized and preserved. Oh what an exhibition those photos would make.

The hosting site this blog uses for photo and video has been purchased by Smug Mug, where the tech people appear shocked, shocked! that they bought a platform with millions of active users. To say that content migration is going poorly is an understatement. So instead of the Walt and Daisy video in which they run around like maniacs in the rain, here are some pretty purple wildflowers.

End of rant.

No rain here (well, a sparse sprinkle or two) but over in the Channel Islands, a decent-sized storm.

It's the vernal equinox, which means the sun's path has just crossed the equator and we'll have equal amounts of daylight and dark. Here at the coast it means that if the clouds prevail (I'm looking at wide patches of blue sky right now so who knows) we'll have that rare event -- spring rain.

As lovely as the past few sunny days have been, I'm glad the rainy season hasn't quite ended yet.

When Dick Dale played the Ventura County Fair some years ago, I got to write a profile of him. I asked one question and that was it, he was off, telling stories, sharing memories, full of opinions and outrage, epic rants, awe at his (then) young son Jimmy's gift for the drums, pride that when he needed an airstrip at his Inland Empire ranch he simply climbed aboard a bulldozer and built one, his belief that the waters of the Pacific will heal you, love for his family, his expanding relationship to a higher power. It was like being caught inside one of those impossible guitar riffs of his, tumbling, blistering, disorienting, and I remember that as he kept referring to himself in the third person, it made perfect sense.

Here's a a good obit in the LA Times, a decent one in Spin, and a great remembrance in the NYer.

The story poles tell the tale -- goodbye to more precious open space and hello to ever more development. This is at the top of Malibu Canyon Road (it's called Las Virgenes on the Agoura side) where not so long ago, flocks of sheep used to graze in those hills.

The Grand Concourse, when trains were how you got somewhere.

But seriously, the clouds here have been amazing.

According to the dust on the windshield, the clouds here today dropped a tiny bit of rain. I know we've already had record-breaking rainfall but I can't help it, I'm wishing for more.

This was on Mulholland Highway the other day, the mountains and sky so beautiful that driving through without stopping (over and over and over again) turned out to be impossible.

That's another swath of California poppies there at the bottom of the shot, brighter and larger than the photo can show.

This is just off Cornell Road in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. All of the burn areas have turned a vivid (and let's face it, unnatural) lime green in the recent rains. Apparently that's the result of a spike in available nitrogen caused by the heat and ash of the the November wildfire. However even as the non-native grasses are getting a boost, so are some of our most beloved wildflowers.

Trolley tracks, Grauman's Chinese, Barker Brother's furniture, the El Capitan, two of the four still intact. Great Bob Poole story on the Barker Brothers closing in the link, btw.

Even amid so many different yellow flowers blooming right now, the rich and buttery gold of the California poppy is a standout. Here's one napping through a recent shower, ready to re-open the minute the sun returns.

The apocalyptic vision of snow on the ground in Malibu, which had people going a bit nuts after a particularly cold storm here a few weeks ago, isn't unheard of. If anything, it's happening less frequently now as the world warms. Here's a stand of snow-covered palm trees from a previous snowfall here in December 2007. The photo is via NBC4.com.

Throwback Thursday: Snow in the Santa Monica Mountains in December 2007.

Visit the Point Dume headlands in the rain and you've got the whole place to yourself. Yes, those are raindrops on the lens and yes, there are a lot more photos to share but Flickr, the hosting site used by this blog, is broken while the newest owners flail about migrate to a new platform.

They don't even pretend to be stealthy

It didn't last very long but we had sun and clear skies for a few hours today and though I'm loving our extra-rainy SoCal winter, I have to admit that the respite was pretty great.

The corner of Sunset and Vine, and really I'm not sure whether it's the cars, the neon, the street lamps or the whole streamline moderne vibe that I'm swooning over the most.

We're getting just a sideswipe of the storm that's wreaking such havoc in the Bay Area but it's enough to soak the emerging wildflowers.