Still HERE Home Sweet Home. I’ll be first in line at the Getty Center the day they open!
None of these Santa Monica pictures are mine and I’m not going out any time soon either. Probably. As of today it’s Ten Weeks Shelter-In-Place. I was counting pretty regularly for a while and then every day just rolled into the next and I stopped noticing.
internet.
I am getting anxious now about finding a solution to my front yard situation of so many things that bug. So I asked Lill if she wanted to come with me to the garden center. Her garden is picture perfect. She specializes in succulents and cactus and is capable of spending The Entire Day working on garden projects. So…that could be my problem. I’m too lazy to have a nice garden.
Honestly, I paid Plenty so as not to be the victim of a concept to which I do not subscribe, the concept of ‘you get what you pay for’. Not necessarily. This picture is from the garden center. Lill’s displays are more wonderful.
I’m still having folks for lunch and I love it but apparently I haven’t been taking pictures…
Just right for a safe and happy corona luncheon. Thank you Sharon! These tete-a-tetes, both in my yard and in other people’s have been a gentle reminder that we do still have friends!
Thank you thank you Susie for finding this map on the Santa Monica City website! All those tree streets I’ve been taking pictures of are named here, except MY street is missing an identification! Here’s the link: Santa Monica Tree Map.
…I being their second garden guest and they being my second garden hosts. We enjoyed ourselves entirely!
They have bananas, figs, and plenty of geraniums to admire. And the jasmine flavors the entire space.
Merlyn, Hilda, and Raffi met me at Tehran Market so Hilda could be my guide through the store that re-opened a month ago, doubled in size and jam-packed with all foods Persian.
The full deli section isn’t going yet but still Hilda gave it a Big Thumbs Up. She bought a ton of stuff as well as lunch from the guy cooking up kebobs in the parking lot. Raffi is having fun watching the process. Everything was deeelish.
Here’s Raffi, Hilda, and Merlyn from Hilda’s facebook.
Wow, right, check out that PPE. I think he made it himself!
Temporary cover on my tooth, impression for a permanent crown on the way to lab. He did have to shoot me up three times to get my tooth numb enough to drill on it. Just a reminder that this is a different problem, not my recently completed implant.
I feel like it was trouble and expense that might have been avoided. I keep chocolate in the freeze so I’ll break off a little square for when a taste of chocolate is just the thing. BUT I forgot that what I had had nuts and caramel in it. So I chomped down hard on the chocolate that turned out to be right in the wrong part of a rock-like frozen nut.
You know how it is, you know instantly, that feels expensive! The view from the dentist’s office to the west, and the mold of my new crown.
Walking home down Wilshire (seems like all my places are on Wilshire) I noticed another one of those street-with-one-tree. I think they are ficus trees.
Here are a few pictures from a walk around the block. I’ve taken photos of all these places before, always looking different.
Last time I showed some neighborhood pictures I talked about the different trees featured on the various streets. Here we’ve got our jacarandas. Next, the red door house, and after that, Sweet Peas, the flowers of my youth.
As you walk west on Wilshire, you can look north or south and each block has its own row of different trees. Of course the palms are easier for a picture. The shorter trees get muddled up with the houses and the cars but it’s lovely to look at anyway.
I’m always hot for a reflect-o.
Out at 5:30 this morning, I was greeted by these cawing crows who followed me, caw caw cawing, from lamp post to lamp post for three blocks.
For the first block it was just these three and then as time went on more and more gathered, but they never settled down for a picture. It was fun though, and this picture will remind me. What a racket!
Wow, I have four days of not-much to report. I study Spanish from an old textbook for maybe an hour (yo no recuerdo NADA!), I fuss with building this new website for two-three-four hours, I’ve been lax with the garden because I’m planning to take some things out and put other things in which is Super-Duper-Intimidating, folks eat with me in my backyard one at a time, I’ve done two trips to the garden center for supplies…etc…cooking and eating, that’s a big one.
And speaking of the garden center, a rose thorn broke off in my finger and it was so deep I couldn’t decide if I should dig it out or not. So I left it and it disappeared into my finger.
That’s that I thought. But No. It is now working its way to the surface which I look at 100 times per day because it reminds me of Alien, straining as it is to break free. Only it’s in my finger, and it’s a thorn.
Beautiful Mother’s Day Flowers from Cynthia – I’ll be enjoying this display for many weeks to come!
I’ve been distracted from pictures the last few days because Darryl is working on a refresh of my very old website, making it so I can take care of it myself, so I’ve been fiddling with the process. It’s exciting!
I‘ve also done a lot of e-chatting. In one day I talked to Marija-Marsha-Ann on Houseparty to get Marija set up. I talked to Beth and Lona on Duo, or was it Hangouts, I forget.
On that same day I had two zoom calls, one in celebration of Marsha’s birthday…...and the other was with some folks I rarely see and other’s I haven’t seen in 60 years. We all went to the same Junior High!
In my daily ‘discussion’ with the garden-monster, today I had to hack away some of the lavender that had overwhelmed the rosemary, and I salvaged these.
May 7
I can’t believe how big a part of my life grocery stores have become. Pleasant as it is to stroll over to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and although I don’t need a thing in the world, still I had an itch to go to Ralphs and get a few items from the old-school brands not carried by WF or TJ.
And then while I was there, and since I had the car, and since it’s been more than two months..
..I bought bags full. It is very cool to have a practically empty shopping list.
What else…also today was 4+ hours of e-visits so that’s cool and another most unexpectedly big part of my life.
Tomorrow many kinds of stores are opening for curbside delivery which doesn’t help too much for the great desire to Go Somewhere, but hiking trails, some beaches, and golf courses will open on Saturday. Maybe I could hook up with a golfing pal and just go for a walk?
May 6
I had lunch with Sharon out in her garden today, and brought home another crop of kumquats for marmalade. This is exciting. Someday my new tree will make kumquats. That’s the plan.
May 5
Merlyn and I have been messing around with facial recognition software. He’s pretty happy with Google Photos and it does look ok (we did a zoom call with screen sharing, long retired though we are). He has many fewer pictures to index since he’s always kept a directory of ‘best of’ whereas I tried to index my whole terabyte of data.
I tried Lightroom too, but it’s not fair to judge them since I lost patience once the system recognized 10s of 1000s of faces. I do have an idea how to lessen the load, but I probably won’t bother.
May 4
A decision was made..by me. I’m not going to try to rent this place until new layoffs are over and re-hiring begins. I think I’ll have a bigger pool of qualified potential applicants if I wait. It’s less risky too. And I’ve got my travel budget to cover the loss.
Remember about the last tenant who moved back home to North Carolina. He and his dad did a surprisingly good job cleaning but it’s not New Tenant clean. For example the shower doors were opaque with soap scum and the right side picture is after three different efforts to clean them. I confirmed to myself that it can get clean, so that’s good.
Oliver hanging out in Lilly’s cardboard house, made by the whole family from a big box, it is awesome. I mean really, look at that fireplace. There are many more so-cool features including a flower box for heaven’s sake.
lk.
May 3
From one of my weeding efforts. I lasted 12 minutes this time. Let’s see what tomorrow brings!
No real numbers here, it’s a concept piece from my favorite meme site, imgur.com. As people who know me can well imagine, soooo much of what ‘people’ say gives me the shivers. Good thing for me knock on wood inshallah I’m healthy and can take it in small-enough slices from sources that don’t bellow and preen.
May 2
We have had some expansion of ‘here’ since I and the tenants have been using the yard more and more as the weather warms and one or two at a time, people come around to sit, far-apart.
We keep the chairs at a distance and just visit. No dancing. It’ll be so so good when dancing is back!
May 1 SIX WEEKS and SIX DAYS…of HERE.
I got on the e-mailing list for these guys, for the Poem-A-Day, and it’s been great, something I look forward to finding in my email every morning.
As part of Caleb’s Cambridge experience, I’m also following along with this guy who posts Dalai Lama quotes from his book about happiness, chooses a popular song to go with the sentiment, and then tells about the philosophical underpinnings of his choice.
https://www.maximoco.com/happiness
I was also following a daily art exercise from Lilly’s elementary school which was Great, but it’s over now.