Weekend coming up

I apologize for the light posting. I'm taking an online writing course, so most of my writing time is being spent on my assignments.

But I've finished this week's work, and I will be embarking on a couple of adventures this weekend that I know I will want to share with you. Since I'm not a Super Bowl fan, I'll have some time to work on that!

Have a good weekend!

Great news

Tonight we heard from our son that he's been accepted into the PhD program he applied to at University of California at Berkeley.

He is coming home from London in March, via Tokyo to visit a friend (so jealous!!). He'll be staying with us until he starts school in the fall.

He has always, since infancy, made his own road when he was ready to set out. I'm so proud to be his mom.

Cat women

This Sunday, we attended the Cat Art Show LA, in Hollywood. Benefitting the Stray Cat Alliance, the show features cat-themed art by a host of accomplished artists, including heavy hitters like Shepard Fairey and Buff Monster. You can read more about the show and its curator HERE.

Shepard Fairey cat print

Joining us was my good internet friend, Heidi of Smalltown Me, the proprietor of the Online Gallery of American Vernacular Cat Art, and her husband.  Before the show, we met for brunch at the Hollywood branch of The Hungry Cat restaurant, and supped upon delicious seafood, as properly fits discerning felines.

[The Man I Love] took a photo of us two Cat Women. I think I must have been talking when he clicked the shutter. I look silly, Heidi looks great!!

Rowr!

A guide to fine dining

This piece has been cross-posted at Mrs. G's blog for women, Derfwad Manor. Go visit there and read her wonderful stories, and works by other women writers.

In adventure stories, explorers visiting a strange land find a trusty native guide to show them around, find food, and survive. When I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1996, I was overwhelmed by its size and breadth, and I could not grasp its unfocused geography. The streets and boulevards were chaotic, lined with a visual cacophony of signs in multiple languages I could not decipher. But then I met Mark.

A hot mess

One of the most well-known dishes served in Korean restaurants is known by the fun alliterative name of bibimbap, a bowl of rice with an assortment of vegetable, meat and other toppings. In restaurants it's often served in a hot stone pot called a dolsot, and comes to the table hissing and sputtering so furiously you can feel the heat of it radiating in your face.

A one-bowl dish, bibimbap is a good option for a solo diner - it's not easy to do Korean barbecue for one, after all! Gamja Bawi in the food court at Koreatown Plaza on Western Avenue is known for serving one of the best and cheapest versions in town.

The Half-life of a Buried Past

The term “half life” means the period of time it takes for the amount of a decaying substance to decrease by half. Often used to describe toxicity or radioactivity, half-life doesn’t mean that all the toxic particles in a contaminated deposit are half as toxic as before – it’s that enough have degraded to halve the toxicity of the entire mass. Some atoms may now be inert, harmless. But others pulse just as deadly as ever.

This is how I think of a shabby cardboard box that now sits in my basement, after its contents spent the last 23 years hidden away.  Inside is a jumble of spiral notebooks, composition books and artist's sketch books, filled with handwriting. My personal journals, from 1966 to 1982 or thereabouts.

The other side of the mountains

Griffith Park Trail

It may seem a little silly for people who live in the Santa Monica Mountains to drive thirty miles across town to go hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, but that's what we did on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday.

The transverse mountain range where our home is located runs from Griffith Park overlooking the City of Los Angeles all the way west to Point Mugo in Ventura County. We drove to the park and left the car just north of the Greek Theatre, and took the fire road trail up. It was dry and hot, but the trail wound around so that half the time we were on the shaded side of the cliffs.

And here's what's really magical about hiking Griffth Park, and why we drove all the way there from Topanga.

Click to "embiggen"

The experience is like inhabiting multiple worlds - the quintessential Los Angeles experience. You are walking on a dusty trail through rugged chaparral, scrub oak and pines, when suddenly you round the bend to see a vista of modern skyscrapers, and in the foreground the emerald green of a golf course.  All this, within the boundaries of a major urban city.  I don't know of any other city where the boundaries between the streets and the wilderness are so ephemeral.

Moon at sunrise

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 I'm rather pleased about this photo, taken Friday morning when the full moon set while the sun was rising.

Chilling

It's in the low 80s today, can you believe it? I'm chilling and sipping a cool mango smoothie in a Koreatown coffee shop with a palm- shaded patio.