[sic]

The smoke-filtered harvest moon as seen from Silver Lake this morning just before 7 a.m. (click to doublify):

 Shine on, baby!

This is Ranger’s “I’ll be good from now on” face, which is pretty much interchangeable with her “I didn’t do nuthin’” face and her “I swear the cats started it” face (note the blur of the wagging tail):

[click image to enlarge]

Every morning Susan divies up the breakfast can of Fancy Feast to the four cats. Bink dines in the bedroom, Pumpkin on the breakfast table, Pepper and Jiggy gobble theirs up on the kitchen counter. For whatever reason, after he finishes, Pepper walks to about mid-stove sets himself and makes the not-so-long jump across the not-so-vast chasm to the kitchen island. Today I caught it on tape and extruded this still. The faaaaaacinating three-second, three megabyte Quicktime video clip with Shadow looking on in awestruck appreciation is here.

With luck, attention and the proper mix of conditions, nutrients, and whatever else is needed for its success, I’m hopeful this little six-inch Afghan pine (aka desert pine, eldar pine) sapling that I transplanted into a nice-sized pot yesterday afternoon will grow to become a living Christmas tree for us to decorate either this year or the next and the next. And of course, I’ll be documenting its progress steadily as she grows.

I’m going to try not to comment much on the images I’ll include in this collection of morning snaps, but I feel the need to remark about the light here.

This vase of dried flowers sits on a bookcase at the back of the livingroom, an area of the house that doesn’t get anything in the way of direct sunlight during most of the fall, winter and spring. The rays captured here warmly illuminating the scene certainly had a long way to go to get to earth, but to shine on this little nook they had to bounce off the window glass from a house about a half-mile across the gulch on the hillside that’s topped by Micheltorena Street and come back here.

Needless to say, as the sun rises there’s only a limited amount of time before the angle of deflection changes and these petit fleurs are once again unilluminated. It’s one of this houses many momentary miracles.