Happy Mother's Day!

In downtown Los Angeles' wholesale flower district

Have a wonderful Mother's Day! Do something nice for your mom!

Click photo to "embiggen."

Market flowers

I had to go to class this Wednesday night, so all I could bring back from the Santa Monica Farmers' Market were these photos. The powerful scent of these tuberose drew me to the florist's stall.

Sweet William is not scented, but, oh, so pretty!

Fire on the Mountain

People who live in the Santa Monica Mountains and other rural areas of Southern California are always alert during fire season - which happens to be almost 12 months a year.

This afternoon sitting at my desk in balmy Santa Monica, two blocks from the beach and ten miles from home, a chance encounter set my alarm system in motion.

A colleague had a meeting with someone who was running late. They were coming from Topanga, they said, and they were running late because there's a fire.

I sprang into action - if you can call websurfing "action". The California Highway Patrol website, the community emergency volunteer site, newsradio sites...one small announcement of fire was all I found.

[The Man I Love] happened to be home, so I called him. My call, relaying something I heard from a chance encounter, was the first he'd heard of it - although he'd heard the sirens. Then he went out on the deck and saw the smoke billowing from the ridge across the boulevard from us. The helicopters were already there, dumping retardant on the fire. While we talked, my mind automatically started listing the items he should take as he evacuated, in order of importance. I'm sure he was doing the same.

As it turned out, it was a car fire up on the ridge, and was put out quickly. Even so, it was a lesson how quickly disaster can happen, how quickly you have to move, and also how lucky we are for such great fire-fighting support.

Where are we?

Look at this photo. Where do you think we are? In the subways of London, Paris, New York?

Walk around, go out through the turnstiles, and head up to the street.

Street scene - it could be a major metropolitan city. Chicago? San Francisco?

It's L.A. Many people don't know Los Angeles has a subway. This is the 7th Street Metro Center, the central location in the heart of downtown, where the Red, Blue, Purple Lines meet, as well as the brand new Expo Line.

We took a ride on the Expo Line this past weekend. It's operating from 7th Street Metro Center to La Cienega and Jefferson Boulevard. The Expo Line will eventually go all the way to Santa Monica in 2016, traveling on the old right-of-way of the Santa Monica Air Line. The last time public transit ran on the line was 1953.

Above it all

The breakwater at Marina Del Rey where Ballona Creek enters the sea

I've never gotten over the child-like wonder I felt the first time I flew in an airplane and saw the life-size houses, cars, and buildings of real life through the plane window, getting smaller and smaller, like toys, as we rose higher and higher into the air.

The Malibu coast

If I can, I will always try to get a window seat when I fly - although for some twenty-odd years as a parent, I had to cede that over to my son.

Harbor Island and the docks in Seattle

On my recent trip to Seattle, the weather was fantastic and I was able to see some magnificent views of the California coast as we lifted off, and of Seattle as we landed.

Here, we're looking right down into the Seattle Mariners' Safeco Field and the Seahawks' new stadium.

Click all photos to "embiggen."

Bayside treasure

 

Chez Jay's low concrete block building has squatted in a parking lot off Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, just onshore from the Pier, since 1959. Although it's dark inside, the top half of the dutch door that serves as its entrance is always open, and in the evening the western sun off the Pacific beams inside to send slanting bars of light through the the dim interior.

A bar with twelve barstools, a clutch of 4-top tables, and a handful of vinyl upholstered booths crowd the narrow restaurant, which sports red-checkered tablecloths, a tangled skein of Christmas lights, quasi nautical decor and red-striped awnings that - if you know Chez Jay, you realize - are made of canvas salvaged from old hot-air balloons. The floor is littered with peanut shells and sawdust, the beer is cold and the martinis are perfect.

In praise of foliage

A path through the Northwest Perennial Alliance border

This post is for Heather, who joined me for a walk through the Bellevue Botanical Garden. It was a grey but beautiful Northwest day - the kind of day that mixes grey clouds with bursts of sunshine; raindrops that spangle your windshield, but are gone after the first pass of the wipers.

This magnificent park was once the property of a couple who enjoyed growing rhododendrons and other plants. In 1984 their property was deeded to the City of Bellevue to be a public park. A group of gardening enthusiasts promoted the creation of a botanical garden. I learned of the garden in the early '90s when the Northwest Perennial Alliance - my hometown garden society - designed and maintained the vast perennial border that crowns an east-facing slope at the edge of the huge lawn.

Beware of Tigers

Ever find something like this when you drive into your employee parking lot at work? I truly have no idea who put this here and why, but it's worth paying attention to.

Beware, beware! There are wild things in here!

Taking care

This afternoon, I got an email that very obviously wasn't for me - it was a one-line rant from someone in our large bureaucracy complaining about his boss.

Oops! I've never done that, but boy, I could imagine how he felt, wondering who that went out to. I emailed him back and said, "I don't think you wanted to send that to me. Don't worry, it never happened. Hang in there."

Has this ever happened to you - in either role? What would you do?

In a world with a lot of stress, we've got to look out for one another, I think.