Ladybugs, Ladybugs

It was Monday when my friend and networker extraordinaire Joel emailed me out of the blue asking if I could come give a talk to his Cub Scouts troop Thursday night about endangered animals. I barely hesitated to say sure, and only after I signed on did I wonder what the heck I was going to say.

I mean, it’s not like I had a ready-made presentation stowed on some hard drive somewhere that I could call up and dust off. And as the workweek would have it, I had little time to build one until yesterday afternoon when we finally shipped the latest issue of my magazine and I had an hour to decompress — and did so finding information on condors, and tortoises and Channel Island foxes, and the like, pulling it together in a hastily crafted powerpoint slideshow just in time to leave and bike up Overland (along the way rediscovering the steep hill north of Palms Boulevard that I’d long forgotten about) to Santa Monica Boulevard to Wilshire and the Electric Fountain at that decidedly nonbike- and nonhuman-friendly intersection where I stopped to relax and unsweat since I was a few minutes ahead of schedule.

Looking down into the pool of the fountain I entertained the notion of going in for a splash but put such silliness aside when I spied several ladybugs flailing around on its surface, the water of which was moving in a slow counter-clockwise flow.

A few minutes later I’d pulled 12 from the water and transfered them to the leaves of the jasmine growing around the perimeter, where they could dry off and fly off… hopefully not back in to the water.

The subsequent talk to the cub scouts held adjacent to El Rodeo Elementary School was deemed a success.