Serious tree-hugging to follow.

Hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend.

Gary had the excellent idea of forming a club and throwing an annual picnic, and I responded to that telling him the least I could do was create a t-shirt.

And so on my lunch break, I did (click it for the bigger picture):

If you absolutely love it and gotta have one, it’s available here at Zazzle.

It was awhile ago, when Susan and I were just barely thinking about getting a new car that I suggested and Susan agreed that rather than trade her 1994 Honda hatchback in for the $500 a dealership would give us or sell it privately for perhaps $1000, we give it to Katie.

And when we saw Katie over the July 4 weekend, we told her our plans, in part because she mentioned that she was considering saddling herself with the costly burden of a new car. She seemed excited and appreciative, but she was also a bit apprehensive in that she had minimal experience with a manual transmission.

So about a couple weeks afterward Susan drove my truck to work one day and Katie and I took the hatchback out for the two of them to get acquainted in the parking lot across the street from the Hollywood Bowl, which was an entirely intentional choice because that was the same exact place 36 years earlier at 10 years of age where I first drove a car… if you can call cruising around the parking spaces in low gear at less than five miles an hour with my mom nervous in the passenger seat and me barely able to see over the wheel of her 1965 mustang, driving.

Everything was going great with Katie until an over-zealous groundskeeper told us we couldn’t practice driving there and grumblingly I obliged and we left, making our way over to a parking lot at another somewhat-less-positive personal point of interest: the Los Angeles Zoo.

Fortunately we were left alone and Katie went through the basics of first and second and reverse gears. Some aspects went smoother than others, but overall she rocked it and  I was as proud of her as I was thrilled at the opportunity to be of service and of benefit to her.

The next week I brought the car in to my awesome mechanic (Long Automotive on Rowena in Silver Lake whose motto should be “You Can’t Go Wrong With Long”) with instructions that he tune it up, smog it and look it over veeeeeery carefully because if anything needed fixing I didn’t want it becoming Katie’s problem. Turns out he recommended some relatively big ticket items: the water pump, timing chain and right front axle. But despite a repair pricetag that was more than the car was worth, I trust Long implicitly: he wouldn’t say those things needed fixing if they didn’t. So I didn’t hesitate.

The following weekend I drove the Honda out to Granada Hills and picked Katie up for some more practice. By that time the new Ford was in our garage and if things had gone according to plan Katie would be the new owner of the Honda, but the car’s pink slip had pulled a disappearing act and Susan had to order up a replacement from the DMV. And wait.

So instead we did some more first/second/reverse practicing in a nearby parking lot and then some residential street driving before ably tackling busy Reseda Boulevard north into the hills and back.

And yesterday, with the pink slip still nowhere in sight, I drove out there again and in addition to some parking lot and residential street/major thoroughfare driving, we graduated onto the 118 Freeway out to Rocky Peak and back to Balboa Boulevard, which is when I snapped this picture of her.

So proud I am. Of her. Of me. Of us.

And while I was moving around Coyote Corner doing just that the bird called again almost from directly over my head in the tree overhanging the sunflowers, and there it was (click it for the bigger picture):

Much larger than your average parakeet, it looked more cockatiel than conure, but I’ve never seen so colorful a cockatiel. And unlike the skittish flocks of yellow-chevroned parakeets that can often be found flitting noisily about the place, this bird had no problem being in such close proximity to me, leading me to think it either was or had been a pet. And when I mimicked its tweets we even got something of a dialogue going on, at least until it tired of the dead-end conversation and flew westward out of the tree directly into the setting sun where I lost sight of it, but later heard it tweeting from somewhere across the street.

So if anyone’s missing a unique looking and sounding bird or knows of someone who is, it was last seen and heard yesterday afternoon south of Sunset and east of Silver Lake Boulevard here in Silver Lake.

Literally moments after Susan had left this morning for her regular salon visit, a strange cat sound issues forth from the kitchen area and I arrive from the study to find a nice-sized alligator lizard on the floor bracketed on either side by Pepper and Ranger who are both looking down at it rather tentatively.

I immediately advise the cat and dog to vacate their locations and they do. Unfortunately so does the nice-sized lizard, straight into the space under the large free-standing pantry (that Susan built by herself several years before meeting me). I can’t say if Susan ever cleaned that void the lizard now occupied before I came on the scene in 2004, but I know for a fact that in the six years since then it has been left untouched as dustbunny incubator.

As is sometimes the case with me, simple plans have a way of getting complicated, and my simple plan to drag a rod across the space beneath the pantry and force the the lizard out from under the undoubtedly filthy place got really complicated when after doing so there was no lizard. In the reptile’s place came shoved out an amazing bundle of pet hair, an old barely chewed rawhide bone, and various bits of cat and dog kibble.

So my next step was to move the pantry out into the kitchen in hopes of revealing the lizard. But all that revealed was more pet hair, and by more I mean a metric shitload. On the OMFG scale of 1-10, 10 being Evacuate Immediately, this was an 8.

It was also around that point that I notice a gap between the pantry’s back wall and its floor, juuuuuust wide enough for an enterprising lizard to crawl through.

Sigh. So first I bust out the vacuum and clean all the crap off the floor. While the pantry’s out I also clean the wall, and the south side of the beloved O’Keefe & Merritt oven. Then I clear out everything from the bottom inside of the pantry and there’s no lizard. So I vacuum all the spare kibble bits that have accumulated there over a couple years — and why the hell not: I bust out the screwdriver  and some screws and close up that gap in the back.

All the while I’m wondering if the lizard had been a figment of my imagination or if it had accessed a secret portal under the pantry to an alternate dimension.

To be certain the lizard had not crawled up into the upper shelves of the pantry and was hiding behind the booze, I emptied the whole damn thing. No lizard. After pushing the pantry back into its original place, Susan gets home and I give her the play-by-play of the whole ordeal. If the critter had not somehow passed into the 4th dimension, the only viable solution was that it had gone past the pantry, past the stove and through a small gap found between the wall and the kitchen cabinets.

After lunch, Susan went to the market and I began Phase Two by emptying out the lower shelf of the cabinet. No lizard visible, so I load everything back in and pull the stove out from the all a bit for one more look back there with the flashlight.

Glagh. That space hadn’t been cleaned in a decade either, so I figure now’s as good a time as any. I pull the stove out as far from the wall as the gasline will allow, attack the surrounding walls and floor with 409 and paper towels, and when I’m finished with that I go get the vacuum cleaner from the cubbyhole behind the pantry.

And when I pick up the vacuum, what’s underneath it but the lizard who must’ve come back here after having all it could take surfing around an alternate universe. Or maybe it had been hiding in the vacuum cleaner the whole time?

Whatever. Next thing the lizard knows its shoeboxed and sitting on the breakfast nook table while I finish cleaning under and behind the stove. then I take it out into the backyard for a closer look, and I’m struck that it seems thinner and the tail longer than what I’d thought. Wondering if this might not be the same lizard, I show it to Pepper to see if there was any familiarity. But as you can see in the following picture  I snapped (click for a larger version), Pepper was all “leezaaard!”

And the lizard was all “Fuuuuuuuck this!”

So I boxed it back up and released it beside the north fence where it wasted no time diving out of sight.

Earlier this week, our bike-friendly mayor helped unveil a new public awareness campaign a few months in the making long before Villaraigosa suddenly found it fit to champion bicycling as a viable commute form. The end-result of the campaign is a poster to be installed in a couple hundred locations throughout the city urging motorists to put a minimum of three feet between their vehicles and any cyclists they pass on the street. The screengrab above from LA Streetsblog shows a photo that documents one of the first of the signs found actually installed out there in the gridscape.

Sure looks pretty, doesn’t it?

But there’s one problem, and it’s a facepalm doozy in the form of good intentions badly executed. Of the three sides available on the triangular display, the poster’s been placed in the side that leaves it entirely invisible to motorists, the very people for whom its effective message of safety is meant.

“But Will,” you might think of asking, “couldn’t it be that the other two sides show the same poster?”

While that would be nice and ideal, as I understand it that’s not the case. The other two street-facing sides of the display offer different ads.

“But Will,” you then might think of asking, “surely this isn’t the case with e-v-e-r-y installation of the poster?”

I certainly hope not, but I’ve read in the comments to that post on LA Streetsblog that others have been found mounted in three-sided displays with the same street-blind placement.

Made with the Twitcast app on my iPhone propped against a beer can.

Arachnophobes beware! I finally timed it right and captured the largest of the many orb weavers in our backyard this morning building its new web. This timelapse at a frame a second, captures about an hour’s worth of webspinning.

And so after pronouncing to my wife last night that I would get up and I would go for a bike ride, mindblowingly for only the second time in two months, I did get up this morning wrestling victoriously against  the usual apathy and excuses  and got on my bike at 6:30 a.m. for a 14-mile sunrise ride up to to the Riverside Drive bridge by the 134 Freeway and back. Oh yeah, and it was pretty out there (click it for the bigger picture).

And what I’ve figured from that hour-long jaunt is that the six pounds I’ve lost over this past 50 days of calorie counting has come entirely from atrophied leg muscle. Seriously, I came off the LA River Bikeway at Fletcher, and by the time I got up the slight grade on Glendale and Silver Lake boulevards to the reservoir — a gentle incline that I used to blast across without giving it a second thought — the legs t’were a-burnin’ and the wind I was a-suckin’. Wow.

The payoff however came when I got home and stepped on the scale and said “I dare you to piss me off” and it opted  not to, instead showing me at 225.4 — a new low.

Sure, I know in this see-saw scene I’m likely to step on the device tomorrow and have it show me 228.8, but I can deal with it as long as I keep my patience and my ass in the bike saddle more than once a month.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for cereus cactus blooms, which open nocturnally this time of year for one night and one night only, closing up the next morning never to bloom again. As such, the local bees (and occasional carpenter bee) waste little time diving in to frolic in the flower’s funstuffs we until about  7 p.m. (the first four minutes). After that it’s just the progression of the petals opening wider.

I think the last cereus timelapse I posted here was of a bloom closing up at daybreak, so at least this time it’s different in that the above shows a bloom opening up at sundown.

As with any previous captures, this is a two-hour interval, in this case filmed August 23 from 6:03 to 8:03 p.m. at one frame per second via the timelapse function of a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot SD1100, supplemented by a tripod-fixed light source aimed on the blossom to provide illumination after dark.

Music via YouTube’s Audioswap feature:
Title: In And Out Of Days
Artist: C-Mon & Kypski
Album: Where The Wild Things Are