Shade

What's the best way to deal with a heat wave?

1. Find shade.

2. Get into the shade.

3. Rub yourself against the shade.

4. Bite the shade.

Quick Blog Break

I'm taking a quick blog break. At least I hope it will be quick. Like a fool, I went and updated my operating system and now I don't know how to use the photo program. Oh damn, I must learn something new.

I'm working on something else that's requiring me to become a techie, so the photo program has to wait. Just a bit. Fingers (and toes) crossed). I have a maximum capacity for this stuff, and my skull runneth over.

Waiting is hard. Ask someone who knows.

Marketing

I was walking with Wilma one day when I noticed that a pretty plant perched on many a front step we passed. Tied around the festive wrapping paper was a card that said "Enjoy your pepper plant!" on one side and showed a business card on the other.

Pretty soon we met the woman in the photo, who was pulling a little red wagon full of plants. "Hi! I'm Diana," she said. "Would you like a pepper plant?"

She told me she was a real estate agent and she was giving the plants away. We talked about the neighborhood. I told her I already had a real estate agent. Diana said, "That's great! Please take a plant anyway."

So, being a lover of free things, I took my plant, thanked her and walked on.

She had canvassed the neighborhood. Those plants were all over the place.

My pepper plant has been enjoying my back porch for two weeks or so, and I've had time to think about Diana Nikolof's evil plan. She gave something of value and she did it cheerfully. In my case, she gave while knowing I would not buy her product. She didn't know I was going to write a blog post about her. She didn't even know I have a blog. She only knew I wasn't in the real estate market and that if I were, I had another agent to call.

Networking is giving. And I believe it pays off in the long run. You can't know how it's going to pay off. You just have to get out there and give.

What do you think of Diana's methods? I wonder what I can give at book fairs, etc? Should I walk around the neighborhood and leave bookmarks on peoples' doorsteps? I don't think people care much about bookmarks. Then again, I don't have Diana's budget. 

You like Smarties, don't you? Everybody likes Smarties. 

No Solicitors

dramatic re-enactment

A knock on the door. John answers.

John: Hi, what's up?

Solicitor: Hello sir, can you help us out? We're selling, um...

The solicitor stops speaking. There is a brief pause.

John: Not now. We're having a physical therapy session.

Solicitor: Oh. Oh! Right! Okay! Bye!

Little feetsies hurry away.

I guess you had to be there.

Note to schools, summer programs, etc.: please don't make your kids sell door-to-door.

Now I Am Five

I have been living with my humans for a year now. They made today my birthday. I didn't tell them different because I don't know. So now I am five.

I get two meals and two walks every day, and I get a treat each time the humans have their meal. I think the treat I get in the morning is medicine but I will eat it because it is mine and because I will eat it.

I get a bath sometimes. The whole pack joins in this activity. I like baths.

I have a cage, but I almost never have to go in it, so I made it my office, for when I need quiet time.

I have three bones. I am tired of the blue bone. The red bone is for outside. The chicken flavored bone is for family activities inside.

I have five places.* FIVE! Plus a couch**, and sometimes an armchair if no one's watching. At the shelter I did not have these things, but I got meals and sometimes walks and treats. I had a cage which was too noisy to be an office.

What I have learned this year:

I have learned to walk on the leash without pulling. I wish we could go faster at the beginning, but after that it's fine. My fur is growing back where I used to pull against the harness.

Sometimes we see dogs. I do not like dogs! But I get a treat if I don't bark at them, so I begin to see their uses. I WILL NOT LIKE CATS.*** EVER.

photo by John Sandel

The back yard is mine. The sun is there. I am safe there. I can have a nap or I can bark. I bark at sirens. I rage at the mailman. I throw myself against the fence if a cat walks on top of it. I only do that when it's important because the humans make me come inside if I do it. I think I took out some fence boards but they must have put them back. I don't know how that works. I would like to give my humans a dead cat but they don't want one.

I know some words. I already knew "sit," "stay," "no," and "leave it." What is "down"? I don't know "down." I know "off." "Love" means "good." I learned "lick" (mostly comes after "no") and "come" (optional). These are human words. I don't say them. I say many dangerous things.

I had a swimming lesson! I will tell you about it when the female gets the pictures.

I like to cuddle.

Some things still confuse me. I have more to learn. I like learning.


For my birthday I would like to have a bath and a dental chew. I hope we will celebrate my birthday today. Sometimes I still worry that I won't get to stay here, but a year is forever so I think I get to stay.

**********

*Wilma's "place" is her pallet. She does indeed have five, so she can participate in family activities in the living room, dining room, and offices. One pallet stays in the bedroom for sleeping. 

**In the photo of Wilma on the couch, Boz's ashes and photo are in the background. Wilma knows about Boz, but we haven't talked to her about ashes. She's too young for that just yet.

***We use the word "cat" to denote "small animal," so Wilma won't have to distinguish verbally between squirrels, cats, opossums or chihuahuas. Too many syllables. We just say "no cat." 

This is What 60 Looks Like

photo by John Sandel

I've never been one to lie about my age. I'm beginning to consider it, but I don't think I'm fooling anybody.

It's hard to get used to how I look as I get older. I think we all feel this way, at least around a milestone birthday. Maybe when I turn 61 it won't hit me as hard. Some days I'm fine with how I look. Some days I'm not. That was true when I was 30.

Isn't age a surprise? All my life I've known it was happening yet it's still shocking to see the signs: the muscles of my upper arms as loosely defined as a boiled potato, the little bumps that appear in odd places and decide to stay, the wrinkles that deepen like windblown crevasses on the surface of Mars.

That last one is more reality than metaphor.

Wilma is unconcerned about age, although she has a milestone birthday coming up, too. She'll be 5 in June.

Ceci n'est pas une chienne sur un divan

A cold is like a mosquito. It's not the worst thing in the world but it's an annoyance, and it usually comes along with a lot of other mosquitos to bite your friends and family. If a normal mosquito bites you it raises an itchy bump. If a bad mosquito gets you, you've got malaria.

This is a roundabout way of saying it could have been worse and I'm glad I got a flu shot this year.

All week I've been shuffling back and forth to the kitchen for more cups of tea between longeurs in the armchair doing crosswords. I don't have energy for much else.

I've postponed all my appointments, even those with loved ones. I kept one appointment with Wilma the other day, accompanying her on her morning neighborhood hunt, and was laid out for the rest of the day. This annoyed Wilma; she does not have a cold and would have appreciated more hunting or at least chasing and biting things in the back yard.

But as you see, we've worked out a deal. When she can't have violence, she can have doggie bliss.

"This way lies madness," you say. But Wilma's smart. I think we've got her trained to believe she's allowed to lie on the towel, not the couch. So when the towel is not available, neither is the furniture. I'll let you know how that works.

No toys on the towel, though. We have to draw the line somewhere.

Forest/Trees

A previous owner of our house tex-coated the place and that has always kind of bothered me.

Rain

Well, that was nice. For some of us.

A certain person named Wilma charged bravely out the back door to secure the perimeter against rain-crazed squirrels. Then she came in and crashed from the stress, curling up in her bed and moaning with disgust. Either that or she was snoring.

It's a good day to curl up, preferably with a book, but for some people that's not an option.

Wilma Acts As If

Act As If: Stumbling Though Hollywood With Headshot in Hand is my book of essays about the life of a journeyman actor in Hollywood, a life I lived for twenty years. It's not easy work, but it's hilarious if you bring your attitude.

The book comes out in August. In celebration, Wilma shows us how to Act As If. 

Here's Wilma with John, acting as if she's dangerous.

Here's Wilma with her bunny, acting as if she's a big time squirrel hunter. (I'm sorry, Bunny.)

Here's Wilma, acting like she owns everything in the house. She doesn't.
(Photo by John Sandel. Raised bowls thanks to Bellis.)

Here's Wilma with John again, acting like—actually, she's not acting here. She's being herself.

I discuss these techniques and more in Act As If, and I give each topic all the gravitas or hilarity (or both) it deserves. Wilma is a very good actor.

Wilma: Home at Last

I'm not goin' nowhere, she sez. Sez she's stayin' right here. Don't even ast me to budge. Don't even.

Please?


(After two shelters and two other homes, this sweet, receptive, trained and trainable Boxer mutt deserves to stay. She settled in quickly and is willing to keep us. We're introducing her to our lives little by little, and she takes everything in stride. We're saving the trauma of bathing for tomorrow, but that's the limit. Think she'll like it? I don't either. She's spent a long time getting her girly-dog stink on, and she won't like losing it. But honey girl, it's got to go.)

Sunday Gardener

My neighbor Dale and I are planting food in my back yard. This is going to be a potato. I don't mind sharing the leaves with a hungry bug as long as it leaves the potatoes for me.

We had three tomatoes growing as of yesterday. Probably more today. They are determined, and in the spot Dale chose for them it's apparently not too hard.

We have garlic, cucumbers, eggplant, and onions. More to be planted on Sunday.

I tossed this purple onion into the compost because it had mold on it. The onion took advantage of the opportunity and sprouted. So I followed the onion's opportunist example and stuck it in the ground. We shall see. Maybe it'll turn out to be food, maybe not.

But as Dale says, "They're plants. They know what to do."

Best of 2013

It's customary for daily photo bloggers around the world to do a "best of" retrospective on January 1st. I'm not a daily photo blogger anymore but I have some 2013 favorites I'd like to share. Being the unpredictable nonconformist you know me to be, I'm sharing them a day late.

Also a reminder: PasadenaDailyPhoto.com will no longer lead you here after January 7th. You can still arrive via LivingVicuriously.net or PasadenaDailyPhoto.blogspot.com. Please change your bookmark because I would hate to lose you!

And remember, January 6th (Monday) is the deadline for public comment on the County Department of Public Works' plan to demolish Hahamongna. Susan Campisi has set up a Facebook page with helpful letters and links.

And now, my faves:

Do they really have these in Venice?

I don't know why, but I love this.

Here's a series I took in Hollywood. Lucky.

At home, on the back porch:

And finally, walking in the neighborhood at night.

Light, its behavior and the lack of it. That makes me want to take a picture.

Less is More and More

After five years and a few months of daily photo-blogging, I burned myself out on it. That includes taking pictures. I didn't feeling like seeing through the camera anymore. Didn't want to carry the camera in the first place. 

But sometimes, a photo is irresistible. After all, there is light, there is shadow, and there is chance. Plus I have a dog. 

I thought I'd have more time when I stopped blogging daily, but of course I filled it. I'm working on many things this summer:

- Putting together a performance technique class for writers.

- Preparing my next book for publication (a non-fiction humor book called "Act As If," about the life of a journeyman actor in Hollywood)

- Writing and researching my next novel (first draft stage, this will take forever)

- Recording the audiobook of Camelot & Vine. (Have you read it? Feel free to review it, either on Goodreads or Amazon, even if you didn't like it. Apparently volume is the game on those sites, so the more the merrier.)

I thought I was going to get the back yard fixed up, but I'm having enough trouble finding time to sweep the back porch.

What are you doing this summer? Have you found more work to do, or are you giving yourself a break?

Winding Down

Folks, I am winding down here. This is my final week of daily blogging. 

Ah, WEEP! It's horrible! How will we bear it?

Together. We will bear this tragedy together.

I'm not exactly quitting. Beginning in May, Pasadena Daily Photo will be more occasional than daily. Of course I'll have to call it something else or the City Daily Photo police will come and get me. I'll keep Zen Monday. My booky stuff will go on my website's blog, where until now I've been reposting my Saturday Bookmarks posts.

I'm not sure what other changes there'll be, I just know there's been some entropy around my place, both in work and in play, and something's got to loosen up. As of April 30th, I will have been posting daily for five years and five four months, and that's a little insane, even for me.

No celebration, though, nothing special, because I'm not going away. 

Change is predictable, They say. Of course, They never blogged daily for nearly five and a half years straight.

Spring Cleaning

In the darkness, climb the wooden contraption that's as much stairway as ladder.

Here's one box full of important things. Here's another, filled with junk. Here's an empty one. Move them all aside.

Step over the holiday decorations.

Turn sideways to inch between Mother's old files and the shelf where the tax records wait out the five years before their shredded death.

The lair is there, corpses suspended almost in air, almost.

Someone needs to do some spring cleaning.

Plums

A little over a year ago, John and I planted a plum tree in the back yard. Soon it flowered, and before we knew it we had two plums hanging from the branches. I thought that was pretty good for a brand new tree.

I watched the plums grow from little green balls to more purplish, more plum-ish.

Then one day, the plums were gone. Remnants of their carcasses lay on the ground at the foot of the tree. Birds? Squirrels? I don't know.

But it's not going to happen this year.

Early Oranges

I had to trim some lower branches off the orange tree.They were hanging to the ground, like little rat onramps to the orange superhighway.

So I have some not-ripe oranges. I don't know if they'll ripen in the basket. I don't know if they're early or late. Our tree is covered with blossoms as well as fruit. Is that how it's supposed to be? Seems like blossoms come first, then fruit. But this tree is out of whack, or at least in some other whack than that.

The clementine did not give fruit this past winter. However, right now it's absolutely snowy with blossoms, much earlier in the year than usual. Or later, depending what whack you're viewing from.

The bees don't care. They're gallivanting back and forth from one tree to the other, making sure our clementines have plenty of seeds and our sour oranges will one day be sweet.

Zen Monday: #231

 

It's hard for me not to tell you what I think of this photo. But on Zen Monday, that job is yours.

photos by John Sandel 

(PS: I'm trying out new templates and styles to see what works. I'll appreciate your comments and suggestions.) 

Helping

Today, we're making chicken soup.

(photo by John Sandel)