Summer loving

Photo copyright Bloom Creatives 2009. All Rights Reserved.

My vacation to my favorite beach in the world was lovely, thank you. I love this stretch of beach, so quiet and picturesque. I found a new-to-me walk to take and turtles waiting to have their pictures snapped and sea oats bobbing in the breeze.

This is the unofficial last weekend of summer for many, but here in Arizona we'll enjoy summer through most of October. It's still over 100 degrees during the day and will be for quite some time - with no cool Gulf breezes to comfort us. These are the days I venture outside only in the wee hours of the morning or just to hop into my air conditioned car. Even the neighborhood stray cats do little more than lounge under our bushes, picking off the occasional lizard for sustenance.

Perhaps I should head back...

Chic beach art

Copyright Cathy Nichols, All Rights Reserved.

So much beach-themed and coastal art is so kitchy - and not in a cool, retro-kitch kind of way. There's only so many pink sea shells and talking crabs one can take, no? So I was happy to find artist Cathy Nichols via the blog A Studio with a View today. I would base the interior of my funky fresh beach house around the colors in this... Actually, the colors I used in my desert dwelling are these same colors! Must be why I like it so much.

Cathy, of course, does not-beachy work too. I particularly love this Ferris Wheel painting, which reminds me of so many of the vintage-feeling Polaroids of the same subject floating around on FLickr.

Seaside

I took this photo in Seaside, Florida a couple of weeks ago. This is the view of the Gulf of Mexico, looking west from the rooftop bar at a great little place called Bud & Ally's. 

They have excellent mint juleps, by the way.

And the sky couldn't have been more blue. Days like that are heaven. It didn't hurt that I had just gotten married two days earlier! The Beaches of South Walton are easily my favorite stretch of shoreline in the US...