[sic]

Westbound on Venice Boulevard I just biked across La Cienega Boulevard.

Ready to show it off and begin getting familiar with my new iPhone, I came home Wednesday evening triumphant against the lethargic salesborg force at the Culver City AT&T store whose entire lack of urgency or expediency brought about a 65-minute bout of standing around until my name was called (while the apparent supervisor busied herself with menial tasks such as restocking brochures — everything but jumping into the fray of waiters). But unfortunately shortly after I arrived home any celebratory orientation had to be canceled because Ranger opted to tangle with a visiting skunk in the backyard and I was unfortunate in witnessing the moment of our wonderful dog taking both barrels of stank right in the kisser — including a substantial portion that went directly into her mouth. Ga-ross!

Unfortunately, I know what that experience is like, albeit on a much lesser scale. And this makes Ranger’s second odoriffic encounter with the species.

As the young skunk made its escape through the gap in the back of the south fence and into the neighbor’s yard, we made the mistake of letting Ranger into the house where she frantically scrambled around seeking relief that would not come by rubbing and scraping her slathering mug against rugs in the dining room, bedroom and kitchen, thoroughly infusing them with odor and necessitating their removal from the house to be discarded and replaced.

Finally containing the dawg in the kitchen Susan stayed with her while I whipped up a batch of skunk remedy (1 quart hydrogen peroxide, 1 quart water, quarter-cup baking soda, 2-3 tablespoons liquid soap — it really works) and Ranger and I then adjourned to the bathtub where she had calmed quite a bit and was tremendously cooperative as I scrubbed her up and rinsed her down.

Oh well. She needed a bath anyway.

The really cool part was after all was done and most of the odor had either alleviated (or we had just become accustomed to it) I finally got a chance to sit down with my new toy. Yeah, but that fun didn’t last long because after I connected it to my computer to register it and then followed the recommendation to update the phone to the latest software patch, the phone crashed, displaying only an image that urged me to plug the phone into a USB port and access iTunes on the computer. Trouble was a vicious cycle then repeated where a dialog box came up demanding that the iPhone’s software needed to be restored, so I’d OK that ordr and it would get almost to the end of that process before an error message would pop up advising that the operation couldn’t be completed because of some sort of fatal Error No. 6.

After multiple reboots and repeats delivering me to the same dead end, I called up tech support and a fine voicemail guide repeatedly attempted to steer me through a procedure that — surprise! — didn’t produce anything but the same result, FTW.

It wasn’t until 6 a.m. the next morning (yesterday) that I was able to get a real live technoid on the line and we were able to find the culprit: I had plugged in to a USB port on a hub when I should have plugged into a port directly from the computer. After rectifying that oversight, the software restoration and upgrade went great and my gadget was successfully revived.

Maniacally rhetorical question: Would it have been too much trouble to add the text “Make sure you’re plugged into a USB port directly to the computer” when I kept on being advised about the FAIL due to cryptic Error No. 6? GAH!

Anyway, the iPhone is working its magicness, and the dog and house is less stinky. But the area rugs still sit along the side of the house waiting to be cut up and thrown away.

So it wasn’t until this morning that I noticed the only disturbance as a result of yesterday’s 5.4 earthquake. Apparently the shaking was enough to topple some artifacts on bookshelf display in the study, namely the baton bestowed on me for my heroic efforts stemming from membership on the Sparkletts Drinking Water team that ran in the 1990 Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon in Griffith Park, which timbered onto a saxophone mouthpiece not used since 1996 when, desperate for rent money during a particularly thin spell, I had to sell my beloved tenor saxophone for the lowlow of $300 (I paid $1,200 for it back in 1986). The baton also landed upon my childhood keepsake Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car  (with working wings!). Fortunately, none of the items appears to have suffered any damage in the “collapse.”

Los Angeles just experienced what news reports are calling a 5.8/5.1/5.6/5.4-magnitude earthquake centered in the Chino Hills area of the region, which is about 40 miles away from where I’m at in Westchester, which is a couple miles north from LAX.

In my entire life as a SoCal native, whose earthquake experiences go back to the 1971 Sylmar temblor, I’ve never gotten used to them. HATE them. One millisecond everything’s stable, the next it’s not. Factor in my location for this one being a new one for a shaker — on the 10th floor of a 12-floor office building — and all the swaying and creaking and groaning and popping and more swaying, initial and residual, left me yearning to be much more closer to ground level.

All said and done though L.A. seemed to ride out another reminder that everything we think of as permanent is far from it.

On the windowsill in the kitchen I’ve been keeping one ripening passion fruit pulled from the side of the Ballona Creek Bikeway and a bowl full of loquat seeds from the fruits I’ve eaten off the portion of the neighbor’s tree that hangs in our yard and wondering what the hell was I going to do with them

This weekend I figured it out and this morning prior to a Costco run Susan and I visited the Armstrong Garden Center in Glendale to pick up some biodegradable pots, which you can see assembled above and filled with potting soil. I then proceeded to plant two or three loquat seeds into 23 of the pots and into the last one went some scooped-out gelatinous passion fruit seed that got covered up with dirt. Then I positioned them on a tray to catch the drainage and put it on a table in the backyard that gets good sun in the morning and afternoon, where I watered the bunch of ‘em.

Small Flickr photoset here.

Now what? Well, now we wait to see if there’ll be any actual growth.

And then what after that? Well, I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to set up a street corner stand and give the seedlings away to anyone willing to take and plant them or whether I’m going to go on a covert guerilla planting mission (or missions) and put them in the ground around the community myself.

Rest assured you’ll be kept posted.

P.S. I still have about half of the loquat seeds left so if anyone wants some just let me know and we’ll figure out a way to get them to you.

Pretty productive morning.

1. Got a package sent off to the winning eBay bidder in Virginia — his prize a pair of Justin camel/elkskin boots I’ve had for 20 years and worn maybe four times during that period.
2. Got a haircut, while Susan got our grocery shopping done.
3. Went to see a matinee of “Indiana Jones” and it was okay in a shoulder-shruggy way. Having Indy pronounce “nuclear” as “noo-kyoo-lur” and have Shia TheBeef’s first appearance onscreen be in a total ripoff of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One” did nothing to endear the film to me, but the action sequences rocked.

And when we got home I rescued a grasshopper that I suspect Pepper of bringing inside. The thing wound up in the space between the stove and counter and I somehow managed to shepherd it into a paper bag that I then used to carry outside for its release on the fence where it proved to be in no hurry to get anywhere in particular so I grabbed the cam and got some up-close shots of it, like this one that’s clickably biggifiable, of course:

Susan called me at work yesterday afternoon. There was a nervousness to her voice that I picked up immediately and I feared one of our animals had been hurt.

“Joe’s passed away,” she told me. Joe was her tenant, the last of the three renters who occupied the house when she bought it in 1999. He lived upstairs since 1986. She said Joe’s brother was there and there were men in white coats and gloves and by the time I got home at 6 p.m. his body had been removed and all looked like nothing had happened.

I last saw Joe when I came down to the garage to help get the rest of the groceries out of Susan’s car Saturday afternoon. He was on the sidewalk talking with another man I didn’t recognize. I said hi to Joe as I started back up the front steps with the bags and he nodded back at me. Joe was HIV positive and in his 60s and in the last couple years his physical bearing had deteriorated significantly to the point of Susan and I wondering how much longer it would be until he needed hospice care. He moved slower and more stooped whenever I saw him and as of a few weeks ago I noticed a delivery of oxygen tanks standing outside his front door.

Joe’s brother said to Susan that he was told by the attendants that the death looked to be a result of natural causes and that given the condition of the body he may have expired sometime over weekend. Susan said she could smell the decomposition as the whitecoats struggled getting him out of the house. His brother told her he’d opened up the windows and turned on the air conditions to help air the place out. It’s weird to think of Joe’s body right over our heads for two days. Maybe more. And that he might have died while we sat watching television or grilling in the backyard.

Apparently, he was discovered earlier in the day by his weekly housekeeper. Whatever her reaction might have been it was enough to alert our neighbor Ralph across the street who phoned the police and Joe’s brother. The police came, as did the coroner. I’m guessing the whitecoats were mortuary personnel. Ralph told Joe’s brother that when he last talked to Joe he’d mentioned having trouble breathing.

I didn’t know much about Joe in the almost four-years Susan and I have been together here. The extent of our contacts pretty much involved passing each other on the way in or out. Our longest conversations involved him complimenting the Halloween or Christmas decorations or telling me something that wasn’t working properly. I knew he could be a pain in the butt, but he was the type of person that would vent his frustrations in a letter or an email or a voicemail message about Ranger’s barking or a malfunctioning heater other such matters and then follow up with an apology the next day. Most months that he paid his rent, he’d adorn the envelopes with a happy face. He’d worked for the city painting out graffiti. He had a pizza delivered Friday night. He drove an increasingly dinged-up Dodge Neon. He walked with a cane. He like the colors we painted the house last year. On occasions recently he took to listening to the TV with the volume way up. There’s an old Univega bike of his down in the basement.

Joe played a part in Susan and I meeting. He’d taken the picture of her that she’d posted to her match.com profile. It was taken from above, with her looking up into the camera and the light vibrantly illuminating her blond hair. In one of his missives sometime after I moved in during the summer of 2004 expressing his outrage over a rent increase or similar matter he even took a modicum of credit for our relationship because of that snapshot as if it somehow should exempt him from such things. I’m pretty sure he said he was sorry for the outburst shortly thereafter.

Joe’s brother said he hopes to have the place cleared out in a week or so. I can only imagine what a chore that will be packing up and moving 22 years worth of stuff, emotionally as well as physically. And in the meantime, Susan and I are obviously shellshocked not only at the reality check that comes with death, but one that happened so close to home.

Rest in peace, Joe.

It was only later that I learned that barely a half-block away from us this EARLY this Friday morning some kid mistook the gas pedal for the brakes and plowed down a driveway and through a converted garage where his dad was sleeping, pinning him injured beneath the vehicle.

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is going to be OK, but at 5:30 a.m. the only thing I knew was that some loud ass news helicopter decided to park itself a couple hundred feet over our house for more than 45 minutes as the breaking new story “developed.”

Here’s what 30 seconds of it looked and sounded like from our backyard at 5:36 a.m.:

It’s amazing how 10 pounds of rice and 10 pounds of beans can fill up a backpack.

I’ve had these foodstuffs for several weeks, but the Burrito Project I’ve been involved with went dormant after I bought them.

With intentions expressed toward getting the Hollywood Burrito Project going again next week, I hauled these a couple miles over to the young lady whose kitchen will be used to make the burritos.

I’ll be out of town for next week’s run but hopefully I’ll be able to help out the following week.

The 78th Annual Blessing of the Animals is taking place at Olvera Street this Saturday beginning at noon, with the procession commencing at 2 p.m.

Susan and I have made this a spring tradition since 2004, bringing our Russian tortoise Buster who serves as house ambassador for our four cats and two dogs.

I snapped this photo of a true dee-oh-double-guh blessee from the event in 2005.