It’s Friday. It’s been a loooong busy week. Everyone in my office is either completely stressed out or a little punchy at the mere notion that we will have two days in a row off.
I am not as punchy as Queen LaFoam here.
I suspect that this may be a tribute to Steve Irwin.
Or a dance of gratitude to the office supply gods, who so seldom deliver anything large enough to require foam inserts to hold them in place.
Yeah, my best friend all day Tuesday was my box of Kleenex. Bad head cold. I stayed home… ended up working from home for four hours, but sleeping a lot, too.
Hydra brought home Tom Yum Koong (Thai hot and sour shrimp soup). It’s the best for making you feel better when sick. It worked. I was feeling much better by the next morning.
Because I went to bed so early. Getting a cold. That’s a porcelain duck, not a real one.
I had pet ducks when I was a kid. Georgie and Baby (named by my mom and sister) where white domestic ducks. Wolfie was my mallard male. He was gold and yellow when he was a duckling, the colors of Wolf Lake High School and Elementary School. Where everyone but my mom went before consolidation.
Wolfie was a headstrong duck. He followed me out to the school bus a couple of times and stood in the middle of the road quacking up defiantly at the big yellow and chrome grill till I got off and tossed him back into the yard.
Good prep for parrothood.
As part of cleaning up my studio, which had gotten pretty messy and uninviting, I made shelf space for my stash of as-yet-unused bound notebooks.
A few months ago a good stationary store told me that the company that makes these wonderful notebooks had been sold to a bigger company and they were no longer making them. I made some calls and found them at the UCLA LuValle bookstore where I have bought them since 1990. With Hydra’s encouragement I went and bought 10 of them, which should get me through several years. These are 300+ page hardbound notebooks with wonderful heavy paper and numbered pages. They’re called legal notebooks for whatever reason.
So I thought, hmm, I’ll take a photo of this. My future in writing is right here, irregardless of my publishing future. And then I realized that my past is right there, too. Photos of my mother and my father, taken before they met each other. Surrounded by stones I found on the beach near Hedgebrook (writing retreat) and little animal figures given to me by my writer friends.
I remember reading somewhere that someone around the turn of the 19th/20th Century said that schools should be designed to look like workplaces. They looked like brick factories for a long time. My high school, which opened in 1969, looked like an office building.
I think this one looks like a prison.
Okay, I’m not proud of this one, but it’s the only photo from the day that came out! Hydra and I went to a matinee of Hollywoodland and then out for sushi. For some reason I was compelled to take this photo before we left.
I also tried to take one inside the theater, but it didn’t come out.
Hollywoodland : loved Ben Affleck. Could have cut all the Adrian Brody story. Click here if you want to see my full review.
The brainwashing is complete. It was $2.89 a gallon and I actually thought, “Wow, what a great price.”
And then I was standing there wondering where my next photograph was coming from, and I thought, “Hey. Who knows? Maybe this will be the most exotic and sign-of-our-times photo I take all year.”
Maybe my grandnephews and grandnieces will be all impressed that I actually put flammable liquids in a private pod and drove it around at 70 miles an hour.
I don’t know. He just seems like a Gus. He and this cow are out on the sidewalk outside a place that sells—
Hmm, I don’t know what they sell. Maybe they sell cowboys. And cows.
I really want to make a project of photographing all along Sierra Highway, because I think parts of it must be like what Route 66 was like in some places in its heyday.
I love driving down a road I have never been on before. It’s one of my favorite things to do on a weekend. Go drive somewhere and know I have never seen this place before.
There are a lot of little roads leading off the two-lane highways or roads around where I live that I haven’t explored yet. I took this one on Monday afternoon. It winds down about 600 feet to what looks like an abandoned farm after crossing the railroad tracks.
It was a very narrow but nicely paved road, so I wonder if it’s maintained as an access to the tracks. If I’d met anyone with a car any bigger than my little Echo, one of us would probably have had to back up.
This is the view from about half way down. You can see the train tracks at the bottom and the tunnel where Soledad Canyon Road passes through the mountain on the upper left. The farmstead is just to the left of the tracks.
It was slightly creepy at the bottom… Maybe just tapped into some reptilian part of my brain that knew that there was just one really viable way out with my car.
Here's a shot of the falling-in barn, for those who are curious enough to have followed me this far.
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This book blew me away. It’s such a great, early example of making a novel out of short stories. It’s so brilliant to put these seemingly unrelated stories together and let the reader be smart and figure out that taken together they are a view of an era.
This book excited me very much about writing, because it showed me that there are other ways to put a story together.
Kitty is demonstrating the appropriate reaction to the board meeting of a nonprofit organization. I cannot begin to express how much I wanted to assume a similar posture by about 4:30 in the afternoon.
We left the house at about 7am to visit Auntie Em, who was in the hospital again for observation. We love seeing her and spending time with the cousins. But after having lunch with the cuzzes, we had to go to a board meeting of our acoustic music club Songmakers . We didn't get home until after six p.m.
It’s not often that I’m this jealous of a cat.
I took a few pictures at the birthday party we went to Saturday night, but the lighting was weird and everyone looks like tired devils in all the shots.
Since I treasure these friends and would not want to attract any demon hunters to their lairs—er, homes—I am deleting the photos from my camera and the rest of the universe.
The important thing about Saturday, then, seems to be that we went on a hike in the morning. A coyote followed us half way around the trail. It was up on the hillside, stopping every so often to look at us as we stopped every so often to try and locate it.
It decided we were harmless. We’re okay with that.
