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).