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.