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).