Dailyish Pictures: May 2008 Archives

I love black licorice. Love it. But it has to be pure and on it's own. I'm not a fan of finding licorice in my dessert or worse yet as some new avant garde flavor in my main course. These little black panda nibs are perfect. Although, I have to smile at the 'Fat Free' marketing gimmick. Why do marketers feel obliged to slap the obvious on everything? If I didn't love licorice so much and know that they didn't have any fat to get rid of in the first place, this would actually drive me AWAY from their product. I make it a principle to avoid all diet products, especially artificial sweeteners. If you really want to lose weight, I think the French do it best. Triple cream brie, pastries, red wine and cigarettes.

This is Purrball, who is not quite as totally destructive as Pico, but she'd working on it. In this photo I have momentarily interrupted her morning snack on a probably deadly poisonous goldfish plant (maybe it's the name that she couldn't resist?) on the tippy-top of my bookshelf.

They came! Yay! In fact, I think they even came while I was grumbling and writing that last blog about the fact that they weren't here.  So today is going to be spent reading The Lighting Cookbook for Fashion and Beauty Photography and the Portrait Photographer's Handbook, after which I imagine I'll have all sorts of New Gear urges that will need to be suppressed until I can make it comply with my newly formed budget. Damn! I may lose all my lording and gloating privileges and Chris may get to build that spaceship yet!

The kitties have started to sample the various house plants. In some of the cases I'm worried about the plant, some are rather small and can't afford to lose any leaves, and in other cases I'm worried about the kittens because a fair few of my plants are toxic. In an attempt to avoid emergency trips to the vet I bought several clumps of cat grass and positioned them temptingly on surfaces the kitties enjoy. The coffee table, the bathroom counter, Chris' head...

This is my current favorite accessory. It is a very cheap vintage plastic rose that has been glued onto an adjustable ring band. I bought it off of an etsy shop. Unfortunately it was a one off creation, but I highly recommend many of the thousands of artists located on the site. For example I'm currently lusting after prints from Groundwork and Bird Nerd. My problem is in choosing which ones.

This is a Datura I planted when I first put in my garden. My mother thinks these plants are horrifically evil (they are poisonous) and believes that it is tainting my soil with bad karma. I, on the other hand, have wanted one of these since the first time I set eyes on one in a humid Vancouver greenhouse when I was a child. At which point I really, really, really wanted to be a fairy so I could wear it.

This is where we vacationed in Maine last year. We loved it so much we booked two weeks  this year. The house has a huge raspberry patch which we had just missed last summer. A mistake I don't plan to make again. I also made the mistake of going for a jog and then running down to the dock and jumping in the ocean. It was so cold that not only did I die, but I was shocked back to life again too. Those east coasters are tough.

I bought a six pack of heirloom tomato varietals from a locally owned nursery. Contrary to all intelligence I am going to try to grow them in pots. Realistically, this is tomatocide, because I'm bound to miss watering them one of these days and they will prematurely shrivel into wizened little sticks in our hundred degree summer weather, cursing my boundless optimism, which I exude even in the face of overwhelming evidence and experience to the contrary. I've never yet kept a vegetable alive in a pot for the summer, but why let that stop me? Just because I've killed every single attempt so far doesn't mean I can't do it this time. I mean, if I really want to. Which I do.  So I'm sure it will work.

This is little Cater's grave. Obviously Kyna and I have radically different ideas about how you spell Cater. However, despite the spelling you can see that Ktrae/Cater was obviously loved during her short time with us.

Here in San Diego, it is officially summer. We may get some June Gloom next month, but the last week has been a real taste of what summers are like here. And being summer, nothing  celebrates it quite like a big bowl of cherries. I have shimmery memories, like heat off tarmac, of a trip through the Okanagan in British Columbia. I must have been five or six and the windows in the car were rolled all the way down, the warm wind scattering our hair as we gorged ourselves on a huge flat of freshly picked cherries, spitting the pips and our cares out the windows.

The ocean is a marvelous place. These are my booties. I wear booties almost every time I surf for two reasons. The first is that I am a colossal wimp. If the water temperature is anything less than 80 degrees, I'll be wearing them. Many serious surfer types may scoff at my 4/3 wetsuit (might as well wear a drysuit) and booties at the peak of summer, but I am not a serious surfer type. I am a fairweather surfer of the worst sort. I like calm balmy days with waves waaaaaayyy below head high.  I like to dawdle, chat, and check out the fish. I don't speak any of the lingo, and my wave knowledge is pitiful. Occasionally I actually catch a wave. Today I saw a small pod of dolphins. That makes it an excellent surfing day.

The second reason is a repressed primal fear of things that dwell in the ocean and the chance that they will want to sting, bite, or otherwise cause harm to my feet. I've been surfing for four years now (and steadily not getting any better) and still have all of my toes. I'm positive I couldn't have done it without my booties.

They may not be as lushly green as evergreen trees, but the wide variety of succulents that grow so well here are visually stunning.  I just wish they grew into forests. Big huge succulent forests.

This is most of the new and improved cage for the lady mice. There is normally a large purple spinny wheel on top of the green tunnel, but disaster struck and it has been removed until everyone grows a bit more.

This is a bud on my phenomenal cactus plant. It sits outside my front door and gets neglected all year and then blooms spectacularly in spring. It is so spectacular it gets three pictures. So you can really revel in it's glory.

Not only does my mother's house have whatever far flung thing you might need for any occasion whatsoever, but her garden is also awash with roses of every type at the moment. I picked a huge bouquet and the scent is glorious.

This is my teapot. I snagged it from my mother a few years ago, she has a knack for having really great stuff in her house. It is rather like Mary Poppin's carpet bag, the one from which she pulls out a mirror, a coat rack and other necessary pieces of furniture. If you were in need of a top hat, cane and a Warhol print in a gilt frame for a Halloween party my mother would have all necessary items tucked away here or there.

Kyna and I are addicted to these little ceramic mushrooms (toadstools?) that are sold at our local Armstrong Garden nursery. Unfortunately I can only find these colorful little guys on the internet here. However, they charge way more than Armstrong's, where they range from $3.99 to $16.99. It takes a huge amount of willpower to drive by our Armstong's without caving to the  mushroom temptation of just one more.

Being originally from Canada, specifically the very rainy west coast, I utterly relish the rare rainy day we get here in San Diego. Chris, who grew up where the snow in winter covered your house, thinks I'm insane. Where he grew up, everyone hibernated all winter except him. He had to bicycle around his neighborhood at 5:00 am to deliver newspapers to the great covered mounds that were people's houses to build character. So, if he never sees a drop of rain or a wintery day for the rest of his life he'll be able to die happy.

I, on the other hand, love the misty swirls of gray and the drenched air. It calms my brain and I find it very grounding. It also provides gorgeous light for photography. This is a Scarlet Prince daylily which I planted en masse under my new Jacaranda trees last fall. I'm hoping to have a vibrant jolt of red and purple out front when the trees mature enough to bloom. Yes, I'm that kind of neighbor, the ridiculously colorful one. In fact, to really stand out, I think I'll paint the house yellow.

This is a little lamp that I bought at Ikea about a month ago. Unfortunately they didn't have any of the fiddly little special light bulbs in stock. Being optimistic I thought I could find bulbs to fit it elsewhere. Ha ha ha ha ha. Boy, that didn't work out. Apparently they only make bulbs of that size and shape in Sweden and the only importer is Ikea. I began to call them religiously almost every day to see if they had gotten new bulbs in and finally they came. Ta Da!

This was taken yesterday. Ordinarily I rest from the strenuous exercise of blogging on the weekends, but I didn't want you to think that I was lying about them being cuter in one day. Truly it happened over night. Hair and eyes. The little brown one with it's head being laid on by the others is Lady Macbeth

I dislike figurines, little things that sit on shelves and require dusting. However, I will grant significant leeway to things that can at least suggest an alternative purpose. These elephants surround a shallow bowl. A bowl that I haven't filled with anything very successfully. I tried a plant, keys etc.. nothing seemed right (the plant died), but I love the concept so much that they have been permitted to exist, dust collection and all, on my office bookshelf.