I woke up early, grabbed my camera (in my futile attempt to learn to take pictures like her ) and walked the twelve blocks to Albertsons for a bottle of soy milk (shouldn't it really be called soy juice?) and a blueberry muffin depressingly devoid of blueberries. It's right there in the name people. Jesus.

It was one of those mornings that makes me realize why I have lived here for so long and why, despite my incessant bitching about this place, it will be so hard to leave.

The air had that crisp morning cool with the usual taste of salt. It was a vibrant blue sky straining to expose itself behind the low, tattered clouds. Rays of sunshine lancing holes in the veil of bright white. Walking to the store and back, the peninsula free of tourists. Just the usual morning locals off to work or off to coffee or off their rocker, blabbering to God in front of the pier. Everything seemed both vivid and subdued. The usual morning affair. Colors leaping out in the gentle morning light, but the air, the ocean, the traffic, all calm.

I enjoyed the eclectic collection of beach houses all crowding the sidewalks and streets, each straining to get that extra patch of land or a slightly better piece of sky. No tract homes. No suburban wallpaper of completely identical housing developments all separated by borders of completely identical mini-malls.

The ocean was calm and gray, a handful diehards out for dawn patrol just north of the pier, each hoping for one or two little rides to make the morning worthwhile.

But then again, out in the cold, dark water, bobbing on your board, looking at the peninsula as dawn breaks over the Irvine hills, watching the pelicans in formation in their slow, graceful sortie over the water, even without a decent swell, the morning is certainly worthwhile. To this day I have rarely seen anything as beautiful as a pelican in flight. Ironic that the ugliest bird on land is the most stunning in air.

I walked home and realized why I have been here so long. Frankly, I live on a little peninsula in paradise. I live in an eclectic, colorful haven away from the subdivisions and McMansions of Orange County. I live in place where every day you can look out your window and see something beautiful. I live in that rarest of settings where urban life and the great outdoors coincide. Where the city and the small town meet and miraculously combine. I live in a place that, despite my frequent feelings of loneliness, has always, since my first day here in 1995, always felt like home.