Daily Life 2016

I was absolutely nuts for these guys. Darryl’s played with them in various combinations. The bass player Jeff Schwartz put this combo together just for this auspicious occasion.

Angela’s.

That’s IT…365! Thank you very much!!

Paris! More of my Paris flat-mates, including Marsha and Kelly from above.

Muriel, me, Windy, Lill

(My!) kids from the ‘hood:

Finley, Avery, Rome, Lola, Lilly, Roxi, Zander

The Vision Become Real.

The clean-up crew – Darryl and his sister and his mom. ps I didn’t carry any of that heavy stuff!

March 23

Jefferson Elementary puts on a Show! They did a play with songs and dances featuring the characters from Peanuts.

Here’s Lilly as a robin and Roxi as Woodstock.

Rome was Peppermint Patty and here she is, acting.

Happy members of the cast. The doubled up on many of the main parts – we had two Snoopys, two Charlie Browns, two Lucys, etc.

Too cute you guys.

March 22

What Lona wanted for her Seventy Fifth birthday was for her sisters to take her to a couple of wig stores ‘just to look, really, just for fun’ but I ask you, look at all that perfect hair on her head now!

March 21

Ann hosted the Monday night potluck and brought her splendid garden inside. Maxine made us a to-die-for (and we all thought we might just die of overeating) full-on corned beef and cabbage dinner because we missed St Patrick’s at her house, and Ann made a carrot cake so irresistible I had to eat it twice.

It was the first night of Dancing with the Stars and everyone stayed late into the night (except me because I have so far to drive).

It was an eventful Monday night.

I had to take out the old-old-sad-dead lemon tree and I plan to put another tree in the same spot – Myer lemons this time and bigger than the one just sitting there now, and a kumquat tree in that big pot. The smells this spring are so amazing.

This picture isn’t featuring the new pavers but the patio was all up and running a couple of weeks ago and the guy came back on Saturday to finish the last little clean-up bits and to straighten the fence as much as possible.

I still haven’t addressed irrigation, plants, or all that grass that is screamingly happy now because we had some rain but will die out again without water.

March 20

Happy Birthday DEV! Liz treated us all to Zootopia which was very fun, and she pre-reserved these seats which were giant LayZBoys that are AWEsome.

Angela, Darryl, Gary, Lilly, Liz, Rome, Dev

March 19

I had a visit with Kathleen this morning and she was still flying high from her chance encounter with Leon Bridges the night before.

Not a chance encounter exactly since she and Cheyanne and Cheyanne’s boyfriend drove up to Santa Barbara so they could go to his concert and before the show Kathleen tracked him down like a stalker to get this photo.

He’s great, have a listen. And on the same day I heard an NPR interview with Parker Millsap, a kid of 23 to Leon’s 26, and he’s great too. What a treat.

I relieved Lill of many bags of mulch from her mulching machine so she could have room to make more and so that I could have some good stuff, and WORMS.

When I get back in late June Lill is going to help me put together succulent pots from her nursery to make my new patio even more delicious.

Indian Hawthorn that’s everywhere now, not the Hawthorn of Proust however. Here’s a sentence from Proust mentioning Hawthorns…for your ‘entertainment’?:

“I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating ‘nerves’ in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks’ time, would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and scattered by the first breath of wind.

“But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer’s when he perceives, upon some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and made seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, “The Sea!”

March 18

Walking with Sharon on a misty morning. Usually you can see the cliffs of Pacific Palisades from here but today the view was curiously blank.

Then I went over to Nancy’s for a visit. Thanks for the yummy lunch! We walked to LACMA and saw the very large new Robert Mapplethorpe show. It’s us in that picture.

We were talking about candy and it reminded me of how when I’m together with my sisters and a box of See’s Candy presents itself we “gather around the box of chocolates like witches around a bonfire cackling into the cauldron”.

March 17

Check out the before and after on the fence. Somehow they managed to make the fence crooked and it is a giant fork in my eye.

Also there are a couple of clean-ups that aren’t done yet. Every day is going to be the day they come and then they don’t come. The pavers are excellent though in that the rain has not pooled up once.

March 16

The after-school drama group including both Rome and Lilly doing exercises before practicing their new play based on the Peanuts characters. Next week they’re gonna put on a show!

March 15

I was working with Lona on her big yearly bookkeeping project which went very well because her helper Cindi had gotten everything together and then I had a vision for a better way and voilá my part was finished in one day. Now if I can just remember how I did it.

Here’s Nancy standing beside a portrait painted by her employer Artis Lane.

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March 14

Pi day and Becky made us pie for our Monday potluck. I was so glad! I can’t remember the last time I got pie on pi day.

March 13

Darryl is making a big refresh of my website which is so exciting, and while he was doing that I got to learn about Minecraft World.

It makes me dizzy, all that whirling around, but wow the girls are so Into It.

March 12

Happy Birthday LONA! We gathered for a fast morning walk before helping out with some chores and then Windy and I went on with our day while Lona, Hartley, Trevor, and Charis got ready to host some birthday guests.

My older sister is Seventy Five Years Old. But what does that say about MEE.

March 11

The cousins Sharon and Nancy. We went to the Landmark on a nice rainy day to watch Eye in the Sky and then enjoy a post-show cocktail at the Westside Tavern.

I put my new underwater camera in the sink, under the water, and took this picture. And then the camera still worked! It’s magic!!

March 10

I had lunch with Boban this week – I didn’t take a picture but here is what happened that very day (omg!) when his 1-2-300 year old oak tree fell over on his tree house. That’s a play house to the right and a chicken coop to the left. Fortunately the actual houses on the lot were ok.

Yikes!

bd.

Kieran second from the right…and his girlfriend third from the right. I’m so excited to visit in June!

cc.

I haven’t taken a picture in four days. Goodness. Not that there weren’t plenty of things to take pictures of, but some days it isn’t to be and there it is, four in a row.

Here we have just another one of life’s ka-chings.

March 6

JoAnn, Nancy, and Me at LACMA. We ate at Ray’s, always a delight, and saw some good things too.

She was just standing here in front of this picture, lookin’ too cool for school.

We walked up to the top of the Broad Contemporary for the view.

Me and my way big head, and the adorables JoAnn and Nancy.

Next we drove over to the MOCA branch at the Pacific Design Center to see “Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road”, a collection of photos she took at Elizabeth Taylor’s house.

All the colors.

And THEN Muriel, who made those fabulous plates, had us all over for dinner including the illustrious David. What a great day!

Day 7 What’s Left to Do

Put the old pavers out here to get the bike off the dirt. Install the ‘curve bars’. Too bad, no way to get these straight.

Cover for the electricity. Too bad this is crooked. The fence is still to be secured.

And this!

March 5

Windy joined me and Sharon for a walk this morning. It was drizzling in preparation for tonight’s actual rain. It’s raining hard as I write this. Maybe I’ll have a nice shower in celebration of the rain and in defiance of the drought.

I went with Ken for dinner at The Smoke House, a red-leather-booths classic opened in 1946, the year before we were born, and then we saw a very fun production of Nunsense, a cute little musical that’s been playing somewhere around town since 1985.

In between I rolled Kathleen to the emergency room again but that’s another story. She’s fine so good for that.

Day 4 in the morning and the afternoon.

Day 3 what I saw in the morning. One of the first activities was to jack-hammer up one of the pilings because they put the posts in in the dark and one of them was crooked.

Day 4 Walter and three of the four guys that have been around – sometimes one, or two, or three, or four in various combinations. They’re doing another job not too far away so I feel the worker-shuffle but so far I have no complaints.

Day 2 just as it got dark while they continued putting up the arbor posts In the dark.

Day 2 revealed the irrigation ‘thing’ and why not run the electricity under ground.

Day 1 after they moved all the movables off the patio.

Day 1 at end of the day.