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During a neighborhood stroll some years back Susan and I chanced upon a pile of discards that included an old backgammon case that we brought home whose well-worn board told of countless games played upon it.

Since it has  sat pieceless atop the piano as a place to stand a vase or put a book. Then out of nowhere I decided it was high time to repopulate it with its movable parts to make it playable again. At first I wanted to do a slow search gathering an eclectic array of  round and flat items, but when I realized that was going to take a lot of work so instead I went to a backgammon resource in the internest and ordered me up some basic wooden pieces, dice cup and dice.

It’s a game I learned when I was not more than 9 or 10, and I can actually remember where. It was at a burger joint on the west side of La Cienega Boulevard south of Wilshire near where mom and I lived and it seemed they always had a backgammon board set up at a table outside with someone usually available and willing to teach you how to play. One day while waiting for our order I was watching a game in progress and my mom asked me if I wanted to learn. I shrugged off a “sure.” Next thing I know when the game being played had ended, I was invited up and taught the basics and fell in love with it. I don’t know if it was my next birthday or Christmas, but one of my gifts was a self-contained case similar to this one, except it had pockets to hold the pieces and die.

I haven’t seen that case since I moved from Encino in 2001 and I’m hoping it’s in a box somewhere in the basement, since I don’t want to imagine throwing such a cherished item out.

It’s been at least 12, maybe 15 years since I last played so I’m not entirely confident I have the pieces pictured above in the proper starting order, but I expect one theoretical rainy day I’ll double check so that Susan and I can sit on opposite sides of it and get our gammon on.

Sorry for the redundancy. I blame Ranger. Who snores, by the way.

Click for the bigger picture

Faded and torn and worn, the time finally came to retire our Old Glory  and replace her with a new one, pictured above. Funny though, I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the old one, purchased on September 12,2001 and proudly waved since. And though I believe you’re technically supposed to burn old flags rather than just pitch them into the recycle bin, I wasn’t about to do that either (for nostalgic reasons as well as what I’m sure are municipal statutes against backyard-based incineration).

So I did the only thing I could do:

Recorded and sent directly to YouTube from my iPhone4. Sorry for the vertical letterboxing. I was trying to hold the device “properly” like a doof.

Yesterday at lunch I let Buster out of her hutch for a little backyard R&R (Roam & Recon), and apparently tortoises trigger some sort of allergic reaction in Ranger — located about the head and neck.

In response to a post by fellow Blogging.la’er Lucinda Michele, which upon her return after a few weeks away in Death Valley and Seattle left her questioning whether she might be falling out of love with our unfair city, I added the following comment that picks up on what she beautifully had to say about the significance of jacarandas and then I go on to somewhat sum up my relationship with my native place. Certainly people far more learned, wise and better expressive than me have captured the essence of this place, but in re-reading it and porting it over here, I like to think that if I didn’t put my finger square on something, at least maybe I brushed it with a hopefully unpretentious hangnail. Of course, on second look have the urge to edit, but I’ll leave it as it ran on blogging.la:

Jacarandas, like so much we hold beautifully iconic here in the city, are imported. Set dressing for an epic motion picture in which we are transients in a transplanted scape, irrigated by elsewhere’s water, developed by the makers of make believe and designed for us to travel it removed and isolated in climate-controlled cabins within rolling steel boxes. On top of that every now and then its true faults are revealed, falling the walls and spinning the power lines like jump ropes as it tries to shrug us off. It is no wonder our ties to this place can be so tenuous and become so disconnected.

For me, the on-offs of one’s relationship with Los Angeles is part of its overall charm. There are peaks and valleys in everything none more figurative than L.A. and none more literal than Death Valley where five miles as the vulture flies one can go from Badwater’s lowest point in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level, to the 11,049-foot Telescope Peak. Whether standing between love and hate of this sprawled city or in between those two desert landmarks I can marvel at both extremes.

Susan and I had considered driving over to Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook State Park for a sunset hike up to its plateau and the panoramic view there of whatever fireworks displays might present themselves across a wide angle of the L.A. basin… but we ended up blowing that idea off and opted to stay in instead, later on camping out on the front porch for a half-hour or so to watch whatever the neighboring residents might fire off illegally. Here’s the condensed version:

I’m a flag waver. Proud to be. I used to just display the colors on the various national holidays, but last year I hung the stars and stripes from our porch beginning on Memorial Day and left her up through Labor Day, and I’m doing the same thing again this year.

Hanging as it is from a pair of mismatched eyehooks screwed into a leftover dowel I’m obviously not a  fundamentalist stickler when it comes to proper flag display protocol, except for one particular point: if you’re going to let your banner yet wave in the dark it must be directly illuminated. I see it as patriotic homage to the rockets’ red glare Francis Scott Key witnessed and wrote about. Proof through the night that our flag was still there, and all that.

Plus, it looks purty.

But for the last two weeks-plus, mine has not been so proved. And it’s bothered me. But not toothache bothered me… more like Gary Coleman’s ex-wife or The Bachelorette bothered me. And so I finally addressed and remedied the situation yesterday and admired her last night.

I was fully going to go to Street Summit yesterday, but pretty much at the last minute decided I’d rather take care of business around the house, like:

• watching a new live episode of Those Crazy Possums and then blogging about them
• sweeping the front yard and sidewalk and parkway and gutter free of the bushels of leaves from the camphor tree because it insists that the close approach of spring is really fall
• playing catch with the dog
• watching the cats nap in the sun
• napping
• figuring out and then further waffling between vantage points on the roof and the backyard where best to set up my cam and point it down at Sunset Boulevard to timelapse capture the marathoners as they finish Mile No. 7 and begin Mile No. 8
• continuing on with my streak of washing — inside and out — a room’s windows a week, with this week’s glass being the sun porch
• Changing out my mountain bike’s way old rear –almost treadless — tire for a brand spanking new and tread-full one
• Getting my bike ready to go ride the marathon’s course at 3:30 a.m. this morning in ongoing aggravated protest at the event’s organizers summarily canceling the event that I’ve participated in for everyone one of its previous 15 annual editions.

That last point brings me to another mind-change that occurred a few minutes after the alarm I set at 3 a.m. to wake me did its duty this morning (and at such a soulless and dreadful hour by “morning” I mean “depthless hell”). The alarm also woke Susan up, and after a few moments of consideration I mumbled out to her “Agh, I’m not gonna do it.”

She patted me on the arm and went back to sleep. Me? Nope. I tried to drift back off, but I. Was. Awake. And have been since. But at least now — more than three hours later, it’s almost daybreak and time to set up the timelapse cam, from which I will then make it one of my chores today to get it processed and loaded up on YouTube.

PS. I opted for the rooftop cam location, here’s her perspective of Sunset Boulevard: