Grandma Susan was here to visit last week so we did what any self-respecting hosts who live a mile from the beach would do. We drove thirty miles to Costco! Susan had forgotten to bring her camera so she thought she'd buy a new one, download the pictures when she got back home, and then send the new, redundant camera to me as an early Christmas present.

Unfortunately, our Costco was not selling the exact same model of camera that Connecticut Costco sells. Astonishingly, our Costcos are ever so slightly misaligned in their otherwise-exact-sameness. So then we thought, "What the hell, as long as we're here let's just have a little walk around!" And soon our arms were loaded with loaves of bread and jugs of wine and thou. We ended up spending eleventy-million dollars on, I don't know what, beef jerky. Dried blueberries. Salsa-flavored rice chips.

Only then did we feel we'd bought enough crap to earn the right to shrug off the heavy wet cloak of food-based consumerism, and so we took to the beach to comb for some decidedly more aesthetic bits of crap.

Behold, a mere portion of our bounty! Sea glass, sea pottery, and the rare and underappreciated sea brick. Tomorrow I'm going to throw my Costco membership card into the ocean and see if in a couple years' time it washes back up in some unexpectedly useful and/or decorative condition. One can only hope.

Peewee appears to be allergic to whatever the hell is blooming around here, it could be anything, we are up to our necks in flora. I have three colors of sweetpea jammed into a vase next to me and they smell better than -- I don't know what. Mike Nichols' toupee? A Rose Bowl queen? Five hundred bucks? To be honest, the smell reminds me of my mother's flowerbed when I was nine years old and it was my job to keep the petunias and snapdragons and the lily of the valley watered. Despite my recent record of killing nearly every plant I get my hands on, I did a pretty good job as a kid. I think I was more focused then.