Greetings from Agoura Hills

It has been another day of the wildest ups and downs I could imagine. We didn't sleep very well, so we were up very early, and since the family had agreed to meet for lunch around 11, after breakfast Paul and I drove through the Santa Monica Mountains to the beach. I hadn't realized how close we were, and I am told we drove right past where several celebrities live, but the only thing I wanted was to put my feet in the Pacific Ocean for a few minutes. Because it's so close to the new moon, the tides are quite high, and the waves at Zuma Beach were beautiful -- big white caps with rainbows arcing in their spray. Since it was Sunday and I'm told less-than-ideal surfing conditions, it wasn't at all crowded; we were able to park easily at the free county beach instead of the state park at Point Dume, and at one point one of the trucks parked parallel to the beach started blasting Kansas's "Dust in the Wind," possibly the most appropriate incidental song ever to my state of mind at a particular moment. The temperature was in the 70s, the sky painfully blue.









We drove back through the mountains, stopping at a couple of lookout points to see the canyons and high rocks, to Agoura Hills where we met up with David's family, the younger members of whom I pleased greatly by giving them my Kindle Fire, which I pretty much never use since I have a Paperwhite and an ASUS transformer book. We drove into the Valley to the vegetarian market and restaurant Follow Your Heart, one of Molly's favorite restaurants (the last place I ever saw her), where we had a big family brunch courtesy Molly's parents and Paul and Dave's parents. Then we came back to Dave's house so the kids could get ready to go out with friends while Paul and I took first Jon and Maddy to the food store, then Dave to the Apple Store to get a new cable for his computer. In the evening while they watched the World Series, we met Uncle Mickey and Lesley, who live in Castaic, at the mall in Thousand Oaks, where they took us to a lovely, relaxed dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Again, there were many happy moments where I forgot, then remembered.