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The long afternoon’s worth of rain had passed before nightfall, and when I left work near 7 p.m. I was eager to see what increase there might be to Ballona Creek’s water level.  The good news is it wasn’t enough to warrant the locking of the bikeway entrance gates. The bad news is it wasn’t enough to warrant the locking of the bikeway entrance gates. But the creek was still up and moving with a swift intensity, and that was enough to warrant me stopping in fascination just to listen to and watch the rushing water, and get the above 15-second exposure.

You have to understand, as a native of Los Angeles with its channelized river no one talked about much less paid attention to unless a dead body turned up in it, I grew up in absolute awe of moving water wherever I could find it. During or after a rain I would often occupy my afternoon hours in the gutters on the streets I lived on, either just watching the water or launching paper boats I’d made and chasing them downstream until they either got snagged on debris or got too close for comfort to the sewer entrance waiting to swallow them up.

The first time I saw a real river, I was 7, staying with my aunt and uncle and cousins for the summer. It was the Tennessee as it curves through Chattanooga. It was full and flowing through the city and entirely blew my tiny mind.

I remember one time, maybe I was 8 or 9. It was a Saturday and it had been raining hard all Friday. So my friend Danny Lindell and I spent the better part of the morning hammering and glueing together these ridiculous flat-bottomed boats out of some junked wood pieces that we found in a nearby alley with the intent of sailing them along the small rivulet of a creek that used to run through the park behind LACMA, only a few blocks east from where we lived on Tower Drive south of Wilshire on the literal eastern edge of the slums of Beverly Hills. The 90212.

Once we were finished we marched over there, thrilled to find the tiny waterway much more full thanks to the storm. Of course, our boats were way too big and heavy to float — and on top of that being so close to the La Brea Tar Pits there was tar everywhere that Danny and I succeeded in getting all over our hands and shoes and clothes. And the boats, which we threw in the trash.

Was the excursion a failure? As shipbuilders, totally. And boy did our moms think so when we got home soaked and tar-caoted. But to me, not at all. Because of the water. The moving water.

So that’s why, 40 years later I still seek it out when I can. I still stop alongside it. I close my eyes and listen to it. I’m fascinated by it. I get out my camera and try to balance it still on fence posts in attempts to capture it. Because in LA it’ll be gone tomorrow and who knows when it’ll be back.

I don’t have any REAL resolutions for this year. No definitive achievements being sought, no dietary restrictions. Nothing along the lines of “read a book a month,” although it wouldn’t hurt if I picked up a tennis racquet and swung it at least that often.

I have some creative goals in mind and a fantasy of putting myself through Rio Hondo Police Academy and becoming an animal cop with the Los Angeles SPCA, but I’m still debating the merits of such a drastic career change.

If there’s one resolution that comes close to being of the quote/unquote capital “R” variety, it’s more philosophical than physical. It’s about letting peace begin with me in an effort for there to be peace everywhere. And by that I mean that I hope to catch opportunities I have for negativity — no matter how big or small or how inward or outward — and instead release some positivity.

Tall order? You bet.

So that’s why my other lower-case “r” resolutions are far more frivolous (and of course, bike related).

Resolution No. 1: I resolve to “Crazy Ivan” on my bike at least two times a week. To what? Lemme ’splain: If you’ve read “Hunt for Red October” or seen the film version, you’ll recognize the term. If you haven’t, it’s basically the name given to an unorthodox tactical maneuver employed by the Russian sub commander, in which out of nowhere he’ll call for a sudden and drastic course deviation that brings his boat either hard to port or starboard and in a complete circle. What does that have to do with me on a bike? Well, what I plan on doing is employing that maneuver at random, basically by executing left or right turns that take me off my intended path and send me around a block or two. Why? Why not. I might get to see something I would’ve otherwise missed or most likely just explore a little bit more of the big city.

Resolution No. 2: And I have to confess, I started this one before the end of the year. I can’t remember exactly when, but on a couple of my commutes mid to late last month I found and removed nice-sized nails from the roadways upon which I was riding, later on tweeting a “your welcome” to the motorists of the city for making the streets safer by a couple less flat tires waiting to happen. From there was born the goal to attempt to remove some bit of metallic found floatsam every time I ride (maybe with an eye towards welding it all together in some sort of sculpture; but more than likely recycling it all at the end of the year), and so far here’s what I’ve procured: a AAA battery, a massive heavy sumbeech of a brass hose coupling, a sealed bearing, a sheared bolt, a crumpled wheel alignment counterweight, a round washer thing, a slotted nut, three nails (the one closest to the bottom of the frame I got today) and a weird ringed pin:

I’d say so far I’m off to a good start making the world (or at least my travels through it) a more fun and less hazardous place.

Susan’s still working on her collection, but got her awesome pix up here, and I managed to cull some 185 snaps from the more than 400 I shot during our three days in Yosemite — such as this one, taken by a kind gentleman who offered to snap Susan and me backdropped by Half Dome beside a snowman in a meadow we didn’t build so much as stand back up and add a misshapen noggin after I’d discovered it tipped over and headless.

PS. My mom was stalked by a mountain lion, but I’ll save that strange tale for another post.

We’re back and blown away. Yosemite these past three days was just soul-charging, and truly so unique an environment was a wondrous one within which to spend Christmas.

Oddly enough I did not come back from my first-ever visit to that miraculous place with 1,256 pictures as I would usually from an excursion of such length to someplace so new and picture-perfect. Instead I return with a comparative fraction, having just triggered my shutter little more than 400 times. Below is one of them, of the boughs and branches of a snow-laden tree beside the Pohono Bridge over the Merced River on the valley floor.

Susan and I are getting ready this morning to head off with my mom to Yosemite for what we’re anticipating will be a most breathtaking and soulful Christmas adventure. Here’s hoping your holidays are everything you want them to be.

PS. If the embed above of our tree isn’t working, here she is on another page.

One of our loveable dawgz is beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

It’s always a treat to look out our north-facing windows after a storm such as the one earlier this week and see the distant San Gabriels dusted with snow. Not counting this past Thanksgiving weekend in Death Valley with its various blanketed mountain ranges, nor my trudge through the slush at the summit of the park’s 11,049-foot Telescope Peak the day before my 42nd birthday, the quick-melting vistas framed by our windows are literally as close as I’ve regularly come to the stuff since a weird winter trip in the mid-80s to Lake Arrowhead when some friends and I drove all freaking day pretty much to throw a snowball and play some video games and then drive home.

For my only white Christmas celebrated I have to hop in the wayback machine to the magical one spent with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when I was seven.

So foreign is the substance to me that I can remember an episode in my pre-teens, coming home from a cold morning’s deliveries of my Hancock Park-adjacent-adjacent Herald Examiner paper route and rushing in to urge my mom to come see the patch of snow I’d passed that must’ve fallen overnight a couple doors down from us in the alley behind the duplex we were living in a couple blocks south of Melrose. Reluctantly she followed me outside, took one look at the pile of slush on the ground and promptly schooled me on what in reality was the dumped remains of a neighbor’s freezer frost before heading back inside shaking her head wondering what kind of urban idiot she’d raised.

Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to replace all those variousdistant and weak and lame encounters with a mind-blowing one of literal snow-overload in less than two weeks when mom, Susan and I head to the winter-fied wonderland of  Yosemite National Park not only to experience its magnificence for the first time courtesy my mom, but also to enjoy the Awahnee Hotel’s famed Bracebridge Dinner, an extravagant tradition since the historic place opened back in 1927.

The once-in-a-lifetime event has long been on my mom’s list of things to do, but tickets for the dinner are on a first-served basis and historically sell out quickly. This was evidenced at the end of 2007 when in the week after that year’s Christmas I called and found it already sold out for the next one. Somewhat skeptically, in May of this far more troubled economic year, I visited the website and found space still available. So I called my mom and she said let’s do it, and reservations were done for what I expect will be our most amazing Christmas ever.

So it’s the morning after the morning after Halloween and the decorations all came down first thing yesterday, but in the spirit of my favorite night of the year and in tribute to what was our most extensive effort dressing up the the place (done as much for Susan and me as for anyone who tricked-or-treated), here’s an unsteady cam walk-around of our Silver Lake Spooky House:

And here’s a far shorter clip that showcases my best indoor ghosts yet:

Happy Halloweek!

In between my regular weekend chores, No. 1 Alabama baaaaarely holding on to beat Tennessee, and an ongoing mental cage match that pitted my flyweight creativity against some heavyweight procrastinatory frustrations battling it out as I tried to write a spooky tale to tell Sunday night at a storytelling event I’d been invited to participate in, Susan and I found time to spooktacularize our front yard with ghosts, ghouls and goblins and such.

Hopefully it’ll be enough to scare off the chance of rain I’m hearing might hit on Halloween.

A Flickr photoset is here.

More on the spooky tale — including the story itself — later.

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A couple days of rains last week followed by some dewy mornings giving way to warm afternoons have startled the grasses from their seasonal subsoil slumber and sent them shooting up at the skies and sun so that they now blanket sections of the previously barren backyard a brilliant emerald green.

As the rest look on, some blades have hefted the feather’s weight of fallen leaves, raising them off the ground like pallbearers in a solemn and stalled procession through the crowd.