I took this photo years ago at the Railroad Museum in Perris, California, during one of those Thomas and Friends Train days. While my son is obsessed with anything trains – new and old – I love the history that comes with these vehicles, and how they’re linked to the growth of a city, county, state and country.
It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come!
Somehow winter missed us here in Southern California, and this was the afternoon skies yesterday atop Hilltop Hill in Signal Hill, a city within Long Beach. We’d just had rain the night before and so the air felt really crisp and clean.
If you haven’t noticed, after years of the same theme, I finally updated it yesterday. Figured with the new year, a little change wouldn’t hurt 🙂
This is a chocolate cupcake from Scratched Baked Goods in Long Beach so perfectly nestled in its box, I didn’t have the heart to take it out just to snap another pic.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend!
If you could split your time evenly between two places, and two places only, which would these be?
There is one other city I seem to talk about as much as New York City, and that’s wherever I happen to be. And at this point on my life, it’s Long Beach, California, a port city just south of Los Angeles. While New York City is buzzling crazy, no matter where you are, where I no longer fit in but doesn’t mean I love it any less, and hella hella expensive – even Brooklyn is the second most expensive Burroughs to live in now as Manhattanites are moving to Brooklyn in droves – there’s Long Beach. 
Long Beach is a city of contradictions, where you can be in a ritzy section one minute and walk two blocks up, and there are homeless people muttering in their coffee, the one that they got for free as a refill in their days-old reused cups. It’s a city that has retro row on one end of 4th street and a few blocks away you’ve got LGBT central, with the Silver Fox to the south of Redondo Avenue and Executive Suite to the north.
I really thought Executive Suite was just what it says, a building with suites in them till someone corrected me and said it’s a lesbian bar. That explained the people lining up to get in at night.
It’s taken me a long time to warm up to Long Beach, but as the years go by and I’m still here, walking along its boardwalk and patronizing from every small shop that strikes my fancy – especially bookstores like Apostrophe Books on Main Street and the understatedly hip Viente Y Agua Coffee House with its open mic nights and book filled-up pin-up board – it’s a city that’s been waiting for me all these years. 
And I’m glad it did.
yesterday was such a beautiful day
as we went about town
running errands, checking off things to do
till it was time to get down
to the nitty gritty
to the fun of it all
exploring the sprawling city –
we had such a ball!
*sunburnt, but we still had a ball
Morrighan's Muse 