wallpaper

Quite an eyeful, here in the Graduate Hotel in Iowa City - my bathroom, and the hallway - from which one can tell that yes, I'm in the agricultural mid-west.   It's Vcologies time - my favorite workshop/mini-conference.  

There must have been some reason why I thought that Des Moines was the best airport for Iowa City.  It certainly wasn't the directions given by our host ... On the other hand, I did come on a direct flight from LAX, and I couldn't have forecast that I'd be greeted by an apocalyptic deluge that made driving a rental car down I-80 for a couple of hours less than a load of fun.  The wallpaper cheered me up!

 

hydration

whatever was wrong with me the other week (the last attempt to solve the puzzle, which is the peculiarly itch-making heart monitor that I've worn for the last seven days, will be mailed off tomorrow), I remain convinced that dehydration had something to do with it.  So, showing that I've internalized that lesson, this is me sitting at the bar in the University Club in the late afternoon as I wait to see whether the person I'm meeting will lead me astray from my puritanical choice ...

 

color for dinner

Dinner was ... bright (tomatoes, avo, onion, cottage cheese, herbs from the garden, grapes, and my latest serious addiction, chili crunch).  There may be few meals that are not improved by chili crunch.

 

Wil E., hunting

No, this isn't in a zoo - it's just through the fence at the Silver Lake reservoir.  There have been a lot of coyotes around recently - bold, fit ones.  There was one in our yard yesterday, just under my study window - probably saw the Dodgers game was on TV and dropped round to check out the score, watched with complete fascination by Moth and Gramsci.  There was one heading up someone's front path on Griffith Park Boulevard this morning.  And then this guy, who - completely unconcerned about passing humans, dogs, etc. - was doing a repeated pounce and dig on ... Gophers? Moles?  (do we have moles?) Rats?  something underground that burrows, anyway, and he looked very indignant that he didn't come up with a tasty breakfast.  I very much approve of this type of rodent control: he was decidedly at home.

 

rug rearrangement

One of Gramsci's many hobbies is burrowing under rugs.  Often he does this in search of his own tail: he can hunt that pretty grey and black appendage endlessly, surprise it, pounce on it - and then whisk it away and put it back into play.  It's a game of fort/da, without having to let go of the object at any point.

But he was up to something else this morning.  Here, he looks more in motion than he actually was: he rested his head against the rug he'd turned over for some time, in a way that made me suspect that this comfort-loving cat was constructing his own furniture for lounging on.

 

Other people’s house painting

After weeks of walking around Eldorado - weeks and weeks - looking at different shades of stucco (all of them, basically, south-western soil colors), and contemplating different trims - is that grey too blue? too green? too light? too dark? - it's quite a shock to walk around and see the unregulated, wild colors of ... Silver Lake.  Five years ago there was a very definite Silver Lake aesthetic of very dark grey house and white trim, with black house numbers: now ... is this the way ahead?  Overlooking the reservoir, it's a little startling ...

 

ready for El Niño?

It looks a bit like a musical instrument; a bit of plumbing; an elephant's trunk ... It's actually a curve of copper piping going from the downspout all the way along the back side of the house, and then, hopefully, depositing precipitation somewhere down the slope.  We've had our gutters mended, edged, extended - whatever it takes, in the hope that they'll be able to cope with whatever the forthcoming Super El Niño will throw at us. Of course, I fully expect them to be overwhelmed if there's a true inundation, but we'll see.  They all look very fine and shiny (which means, of course, that I feel very vulnerable to copper thieves, but the gutter guy reassures us that they'll soon tarnish and be less attractive to human magpies looking to carry off glittering loot).

 

ants

This notice tells its own dismal story.  It wasn't a day in which I needed to walk into the bathroom first thing, and encounter battalions of tiny black ants.  They were coming in at the top of the window, marching down one side, and one platoon then struck out across the floor, and another into the washbasin ...

Luckily, we had some diatomaceous earth left over from earlier invasions, and I've been generous with its distribution.  But still - that bathroom is off bounds while the white powder does, I hope, do its job.  However, I'm itchy all over with imaginary ants, and that's on top of a very itchy reaction to the adhesive on the heart monitor I have to wear for a week, which feels like having a whole lot of mosquito bites under it.  This seems (for what else is google for, if not wondering about shared experiences) very depressingly common ...

 

LA wall

It's LA abstract wall week ... or: I seem to have spent a very great deal of today in the car.  I might easily resent how much driving one has to do in Los Angeles (I certainly resent how much I have to pay for gas at the moment, but that's another matter), were it not for the fact that there is always so much to look at.

 

architectural eclecticism

I feel that I should be able to extract some kind of contemporary allegory from this: a Russian orthodox church; a very shuttered and boarded off gas station, but it defeats me.  Even if the reason for my driving across town today was to visit the dentist, it was still good to have a sustained exposure to Los Angeles's architectural diversity - something I've just discovered, too, enhances the first couple of pages of The Day of the Locust, a novella that I really should have read before now, but haven't ...

 

caesalpinia pulcherrima

Down the street and round the corner, this tree is always spectacular in September.  There are plenty of trees and plants - well, at least three that grow around here - known as "Bird of Paradise." This is one of them, also known as Pride of Barbados, as well as Red Bird of Paradise - but to distinguish it from other ones, let's give it its full Latin name: extremely beautiful, indeed.  You wouldn't think that it belonged to the pea family, would you?

 

cracking street art

A claw extending on this large street mural in Venice CA, cracking and peeling in the sun.  That was how we felt when we went off to have lunch with a friend at Gjelina's - normally a great place for lunch, but it was so hot, so humid, that we ordered take-out and retreated.  Of course, how can one not wonder if this is the new and awful normal?  It is surely never this humid and hot by the ocean - not in mid-September.

 

a much quieter day!

Who knew that we'd get a second round of roses in September: these are The Poet's Wife, looking good.

I was so grateful, after yesterday, for a quiet day... and I feel fine, if somewhat tired.  Which isn't to say that I'm ignoring that weird event and what it told me my blood pressure can do (I'm very inclined to blame the heat and humidity for sending things haywire): it was soberingly unpleasant.  But my gratitude for being able to sit around quietly is nothing to my gratitude to you kind people who reached out, and who recognized what a scary day it was.

 

not the day I was planning

All seems to be well, thank goodness - but I spent most of today in Glendale Memorial Hospital (and may I recommend their emergency room and teams of people, should you need them ...).  We were heading off for a walk this morning in Griffith Park, parking at the zoo - and I suddenly felt very dizzy and weird, and thought it best that Alice drove me straight to the ER ... and I was tested for everything under the sun: CAT scan (no stroke); a long, noisy MRI (nothing remarkable); ECG (heart fine); blood work - presumably fine, since no one ever told me it wasn't ... the only unusual thing was very high blood pressure when I was admitted.  So I'll need to sort that out: everything else was a huge relief.  Also a huge relief was being released ... Top marks to Alice for her thoughtfulness, even while also trying to deal with the gutter menders.  I'm exhausted ...

 

seasonal

This view of Silver Lake reservoir has the air of a slightly faded, vignetted picture postcard of the Lake District from the sixties.  The vignetting is, in fact, the product of taking the photo through the mesh of the wire fence surrounding the reservoir - and then I decided that the effect was so dated that I deliberately wouldn't crop it, and indeed would tweak the color just a little for full period impact.  What remained the same was the bough of faintly autumnal leaves ...

... though nothing says Changing Seasons quite so loudly as going into Gelsons and seeing this family already hanging out there.  It's only September 10th ...

 

they made it!

 

... as did we, but - arriving when the temperature was still 104 - we were all a little wilted.  But here you'll see four little troughs of herbs, and geraniums, and probably a few stray tiny morning glory plants.  We didn't exactly smuggle them back from Santa Fe (where they would almost certainly have perished from drought or - the geraniums, in a month or so - from frost), because technically it's legal to bring plants into California from Santa Fe county.  But not all plant inspectors at the border know that, so they crossed the state line and through the inspection station sweating away under some judiciously positioned raincoats.  Of course, we weren't stopped - I don't think we have been under this regime, since the personnel are doubtless off somewhere doing less savory things.

the good, the ugly, and the bad - driving back to LA, first leg

the good would be the remaining bits of beauty in the back yard ... and the early morning sun.  Rest assured I have four troughs of plants in the back of the car, which smells like a greenhouse (I've made sure the catmint is in a direct and soothing line from the kitty noses).

The ugly comes in the form of a truly vile t-shirt spotted at a gas station just outside of Albuquerque - a t-shirt that glosses over how this regime treats vets, one might add -

And the bad?  Of course that would be Gramsci - put him into a good hotel bedroom, and he's trying to tear the rugs off the walls ...

 

geometry

Is there anything more perfect than a sleeping Moth in her basket?  And whilst you're at it, you might want to count not just circles, but triangles, starting with her pretty ears, and then looking at holes in the wooden bench, the carpet, the angles of light.  She's getting as much sleep as possible: they both of them know (bags everywhere) that they'll be on the road tomorrow, and they will expect to be nice and active and bouncing off the furniture all through the llight at La Posada, I'm sure ...

 

winding down

... that would both be the plants outside, and us, working hard at our packing and cleaning and generally trying to assure Gramsci (Moth is much more laid back) that we won't be leaving him here.  I remember a colleague back at Rutgers - Myra Jehlen - hearing my lamentations one day about decamping from New Jersey to New Mexico at the end of one semester or another, and from the vantage point of someone with a house in Vermont, she advised me just to keep one of everything in each place.  I can see the value of that when it comes to ... vacuum cleaners, say; but books?  And I'm not going to have duplicate copies of my favorite clothes.  And what about Moth's specialist cat food?  And so on ...

 

pies

I'm not a big pie eater - or, if that sounds improbably puritanical, I'm not a big pastry easter: I will happily munch my way through the interior of any number of pies, sweet or savory.  But the array as we left Harry's this evening was extraordinarily impressive (the pie cupboard was being tidied out for the evening before these all go back to have a good night's sleep), and even I, despite being full of tinga de pollo tacos, was very tempted .. (no, I didn't succumb.  But it could have been a close call).

 

not the most picturesque of views

... but for the bevy of stucco-menders and layers; the carpenter; the painters; the handymen who have been passing through this place and who will continue to do so for the next few weeks, one imagines that it's a very welcome sight.

The people who may be less happy, however - or the person - would be the realtor selling the house on the left - now 52 days on the market, and its owners long ago having departed for Brooklyn.  Somehow the deliverers of this useful tiny edifice have deposited it in the sightline of just about the one window that doesn't look out into an overgrown tree ...

 

more rearrangement ...

The stuccoing, the mending, and the rest of it continues ... We've had to pull all the plant pots away from the house and the walls and into the middle of the yard - where they look quite good massed together, especially with the solar powered lights stuck in them (relocated from the edge of the terrace, so workers don't trample on them) ...

 

Zozobra week!

 

It's Zozobra week!  Old Man Gloom will go up in flames on Friday night in Fort Marcy Park (luckily a bear has descended from a tree there and ambled off), full of things that people want to get rid of written on little pieces of paper - bad things that they've said or done or thought (a bit like a confessional), or, let's say, the name of the president.  We won't, I think, be there (although I've always rather wanted to go) - but I'm happy to celebrate him in virtual form, here in a mural on the back of a closed dry cleaners on Cerrillos.  

September sky

Hard to believe that we've arrived at September, but when I went for a (literally) fast walk this evening, I could more or less tell myself that there was a faint sense of fall in the air.  Another way of putting it: it's time the Dodgers got their act together ...

 

rearrangement

The stucco work on the house began today - and the team managed to accomplish a good deal before a big storm struck.  We had to move plant pots, and furniture, and - well, everything, away from the house, which means we have this fetching little arrangement of chairs and table sitting as if we are about to take tea, or a margarita, overlooking the road, with a hint of sunset in the background.  The cats did not care for the power washing (nor did we).  And as a result of the storminess, we were without internet for about six hours, which was very far from a blessing when faced with various end-of-month deadlines: there's a limit to what one can do by way of tethering one's computer to the one-to-two fluctuating bars of reception that one gets on the sort-of grid out here.

 

Geometry of dining

To dinner with friends at La Paloma - an excellent Mexican (as opposed to New Mexican) restaurant in town - with a view from our table through to a private room/courtyard - everything looking poised for an evening ... though no one else ever arrived there.

 

Coopy

Our magnificent Coopers Hawk is back - looking for ... rabbits? 

We went to see Eliza Gilkyson (plus Ray Wylie Hubbard and Jimmie Dale Gilmore) at the Lensic tonight, and it struck me how, when I first heard and fell for Gilkyson's music which must have been ... maybe in 2000, maybe a little earlier ... the line in "The Beauty Way" that goes "Red hawk diving for a rat on Sunset" meant absolutely, absolutely nothing to me.

 

leaf

I haven't anything in particular to say about this young Morning Glory leaf - it's just a particularly nice leaf.

One of the regular exercises (or so it felt like) at my junior school - when I was eight or nine -was to find words to substitute for those bland, lazy four letters: "nice."  Ummmm - luminous? fresh? spiny and corrugated? cheerful?

 

choices

... and here are three of the four painted bits of board, which we are moving around into shadow, into shade, into sun, in order to see what looks best when it comes to wood trim (the re-stuccoed walls will remain more or less the same reddish brown, most likely).  I think it's fair to say that they don't show very accurately in a photograph - or rather, perhaps, the photographs indicate quite how changeable the colors are in different lights.  This afternoon we had a phone call from the stucco company saying they'd had a cancelation, and could they start work on Monday ... please keep your fingers crossed that they are not power-washing the walls during any important Zoom meetings, or, for that matter, when I'm trying to Think.

 

local lichen

It's been a while since I've celebrated lichen here ... I was sitting outside on a rock this afternoon, painting some boards in a range of sample colors: one of them will end up being the new paint for the trim on our house here when we get it re-stuccoed very soon (what color do I want? "lichen" is the best description I can find, though "winter chamisa" may run it close: I think it'll likely end up being something called "misted green."  Anyway - what color is lichen?  None of these is quite what I meant ...).

 

sleeping animals

One of these animals is not like the others ... we went to Petsmart this morning to buy some cat litter, and they had some truly adorable ferrets.  I swear my mother kept ferrets when she was a little girl, but it might have been Auntie Marjorie across the road (though I think she had rabbits, and the two aren't exactly compatible).  But I doubt I have a note of this anywhere, and so can probably never verify it ...

And that, I thought, was it for sleeping animals of note for today.  But after lunch, I didn't sit in my desk chair since Moth was in it, and was reading peacefully in my armchair - then looked round, and thought - no, surely Moth doesn't have that many paws?  In five years, I have never, ever seen them curled up asleep together.  They can hardly have been doing it to keep warm (although admittedly, the a/c was on).  This went on for a while, and was the sweetest thing.  Maybe a corner has been turned?

And Gramsci is even more adorable than a white ferret.

 

marigolds

Clearly, I've not changed my camera lens, and am still experimenting with semi close-up focusing ... all the while assessing which plants I'll uproot from their pots and transplant, in a couple of weeks, from dry New Mexico to scorching Los Angeles.  The car journey is always an adventure, because of going through the agricultural checkpoint: although it's legal to transport horticulture from Santa Fe county to California, one can sound like a very pesky know-it-all if one gets stopped and tries to explain.  In any case, the herbs will all come, and the geraniums, and after that ...?  Not that the photogenic quality of one plant over another is a determining factor ...

 

a flower gets its close-up

I've been cleaning the closet in my study today - a very long overdue job, despite various surface attempts that have been made over the last decade or so.  You never know what you will find - but I was delighted to uncover my camera's Micro lens (yes, I know that, in turn, that's an odd thing to.misplace entirely, but I never managed to work it properly, so it was languishing).  Today I, er, read the manual responsibly ....

My study closet had corners that were like a creative graveyard.  I'm less talking about dead felt tip pens than old software: remember when one had to insert a CD in order to install various early forms of Photoshop; for things like free photo borders that came with magazines that probably no longer exist in hard copy; for installing printers, and stuff for one's iPod (remember iPods?); and to run Tom Tom - that early form of GPS that didn't work very well at all, and inevitably ran out of usefulness when cell phone coverage, or its equivalent, lapsed.  The recent past sometimes seems a long time ago ...

 

curdled sky

A modest view of the great outdoors from - more or less - outside our fron door this morning, before I descended into a day from which I emerged with a promotion letter for someone at another institution written and polished.  These things take so long!  It's satisfactory when they're completed, sure - and one agrees to write them because - well, that's the way the system works.  But it's one of the profession's stranger genres.

 

cat in a tree trunk

Someone has a brand new crinkle tunnel, with a couple of side branches.  Its purchase was inspired, of course, by my chapter on Bark.  It lacks lichen, but it does have a few green leaves flapping off it, and, quite wonderfully, there are some really kitsch squirrels photo-superimposed on it.  Grammy has never seen a tunnel, or box (or bath) that he didn't want to inhabit, but I'm pleased to report that Moth did her own inspection and temporary occupation.

 

alliums

they are out! - in our front yard.  I always marvel at how one day they look like bulging chive stems, and the next they're a flurry of stalks and flowers and black seeds.  And when the storm burst this afternoon, I realised that one reason why they do so well in that precise spot is that water pours from the roof down one of the canales onto the, - even though we've been in such a drought, clearly enough moisture has been deposited on them, one way or another, for them to flourish once again.

 

morning light

shining through the kitchen window, blocked by the tin horse, and reaching the fireplace: a thin morning sun coming through thin cloud, or haze - I don't think smoke, because it was blowing east, not south, today.

 

the bathtub

It may be that Gramsci is in hunting mode - one might, indeed, find a spider in the bathtub, and if one's exceptionally lucky, a centipede, or a Jerusalem bug.  But actually, between the outer curtain, and the inner curtain, and the bath mat - so many possibilities for hide and seek.  He's been in a boisterous mood today, for all that he looks like a bathtub philosopher (that would be Diogenes of Sinope, I think, although in the Gérôme painting of this ancient cynic in his tub, he's surrounded by a lot of rather wolf-like, unfriendly dogs).

 

stripey morning glory

My morning glories here self-seed, year after year, and natural selection seems to have ensured that by now they are mostly Grandpa Ott, with a smaller number of deep pink ones.  But this morning ... a solitary pale blue and purple Harlequin made its appearance above the petunias, and very lovely it was, too.

 

wildlife

A couple of days ago, I threw out an orange that had gone bad - threw it at a distance, as if it were a baseball - to see whether something would eat it.  Obviously a bird or a critter has opened it up, and it's now been occupied by huge black ants.  Which would be fascinating in its own right - but was upstaged, half an hour later, by our going for an early morning walk and encountering ... a bear!  A brown, furry, positively cuddly bear (they have been coming down from the mountains because it's so dry and parched this summer), which ambled across the road and then, realizing we were looking in its direction, lolloped off down the green belt and towards the railroad tracks.  

This is the first bear I've seen in Eldorado in 23 years.  A few years back, someone posted to Nextdoor in rather disgruntled fashion that they'd moved here because they'd become fed up with bears in California, and they'd looked out of their window that morning and seen one in a tree.  But this is not ... usual.