First of all, the photos here? Not great. But the ocean's a fabulous blue and it's sparkly from all the wind and sun and anyway, if you've ever seen a dolphin it's easy to imagine that's what you're looking at here, which while being a decent excuse for posting the pix isn't actually a very good reason, but c'est la guerre.

OK. You know how it goes in cycles, the people you randomly run into? Sometimes you'll go for weeks without seeing someone and suddenly there they are, every day, everywhere you go. It's happening to me right now with dolphins.

It started last week, a single dolphin making a slow, high, arcing leap just as I reached the beach, just as the sun began to rise. It was awesome. It was epic. (And yes, the fact that I'm weakened right now by the flu and every little thing makes me weepy may have something to do with the hyperbole here.) (But I don't actually believe that.)

Since then, I've seen dolphins every day, almost every time I look at the ocean. (And whales! I saw a pod of whales a few days ago and good grief it was amazing!) (Do you think the flu makes you use parenthesis more?)

I was driving up PCH yesterday, the wind smacking my car around, flinging seagulls sideways, and right offshore, across from Malibu Seafood, a pod of about a dozen dolphins was going a little nuts.

They were leaping and jumping and thrashing and surfing and they stopped traffic, it was that amazing. They rose clear out of the water and you could hear the thwack of their landing. Two of the larger ones raced, parallel to shore, raced in the shallows for a few hundred yards, cleared the crest of the shore break and in the water, crystalline at that moment, you could see their flukes and fins and markings.

I remember standing on the bluff here in Paradise Cove the day we moved in, watching a pod of dolphins and asking my companion when he thought we might become blasé about the sight. Sixteen years later the answer is, not quite yet.