Such a handsome bird. Look at those feet!

Every spring after the rains the yuccas bloom. They're so beautiful, cascades of vivid white, each floret suspended, in motion in the slightest breeze. Far away they look like feathers, close up it's more like a chandelier. Fewer of them each year as this drought drags on, so all the more precious.

This was back in February, when it almost but not really rained.

We have spent so much time on these trails during the pandemic, this blog could accurately have been renamed Here in Solstice Canyon.

A particularly handsome bird we see nearly each time we go walking in Legacy Park.

It's always been a bit of a struggle to keep the dogs from taking over the blog. But the sight of the baby Labrador's face in the sideview mirror (her brain hasn't caught up to her age so yes, still a baby) makes resistance futile.

And no, my ability to photograph a black dog hasn't improved during the blog's six-month hiatus.

It rained here last night, a rare April shower in this driest of dry years. Less than an hour, pounding down at times, enough to water the garden and gather in puddles and scent the air, and add a few weeks to our annual season of green.

Turns out I'm not the only one who gives a sigh of relief after dropping off the very (very) busy Labrador at doggie daycare on Thursdays.

Too beautiful for words. Literally.

Of all the wildlife I expect to see in the mountains here, ladybugs are not on the list. But this year, as late-season rains turn spring greenery even greener, they have appeared. There are so many that the plants are dotted in red. I've even picked a few from Walt's fur. They sit on your finger for barely a second, barely enough time to summon up a wish before their shell parts and those improbable wings emerge and whir them away.

It's more than six months since the last post on Here in Malibu. Seriously, yikes. I miss sharing the things I see in my little corner of California. Even more than that, I miss the community that Kevin had amassed. I stopped because writing in the silence of a shuttered web site was beyond eerie. And yet not writing has been even more strange.

I've been shopping around at the various hosting platforms and honestly, it's a mess out there. Plug-and-play options don't make it easy for you to use html, which is what I'm used to here at LAO. And the more tech-y platforms are, well, too tech-y for me. I've been taking photos every day, writing blog posts in my head, visiting and re-visiting the usual suspects like wordpress and squarespace and medium, and...pfft. I put a toe into instagram and it's fine. I'm not a fan of likes and comments and knowing how many followers you have. SEO, not something I want to chase. Sacrilege, I know.

So I'll keep shopping and trying and hoping that something clicks. Blogs are dinosaurs of the online world, I know that, but I'd still like this one to continue. Meanwhile, here's Teddy, who is 1 year old now, and madly in love with a certain creek in the Santa Monica Mountains. She even got Walt to dip his toes.