I finished The Library Book and there were no dark surprises. What is surprising is the number of holds it has in the Santa Cruz library system–91 at the time my turn came up. It’s a perfectly decent book, but not what I would consider exemplary of my adopted home, though I am surely no expert on SC.

There was one surprise in the penultimate chapter, in which the author stated that there were more libraries in the US than McDonald’s. I’m not an expert on that either, and I understand that data beats intuition when one seeks something simple like a physical count, but that statistic feels so far off. As it turns out, it depends on how one counts libraries. There are 14,000 Mickey Ds and 9000 public libraries, just as I would have guessed, but if you add 3000 academic libraries and 98,000 school libraries, the hamburlars lose.

Except in SC, where we have two McDonald’s restaurants and four branches of the public library. I definitely want to get to know SC better.

One feature I appreciate is the minus tide, a great tidepooling opportunity when it is both more than a foot below average (MLLW) and happens during sunlight, which it did last weekend, for the last time until October. I spent an hour looking at creatures, mostly hermit crabs and anemones, plus a single sea star. While I appreciate our common creatures, like anyone I was hoping for a sea hare, or a sea urchin, or the bonus round, an octopus. At one point I said to myself, If I could just find a nudibranch, I would be happy. Right after that, I found one!

Nudibranchs are sea slugs that come in all sorts of interesting colors and shapes. This one is close to three inches long in this position. It was hanging below a rock, so I stretched my phone out over the water then pointed it back to get this angle.

On Monday, my husband and I walked to Capitola on the sand, something we can only do during a minus tide. The weather was brisk and sunny, a perfect mid-February day. No surprise there, either.