It Was a Rainy Night in Georgia; Now It's a Snowy Day in Georgia.

Or at least it is in my part of Georgia.  

I suspect it will be rainy again, or at least, water will fall from the melting snow in the trees.

And it's not FAIR!!!  I was just in LA and the weather was perfect every day.

The sky was blue; the humidity was non-existent, which, as it turns out, is a very bad thing.  The morning we left was the beginning of the horrible fires there. The Creek fire is within 10 miles of my daughter's apartment, too close for comfort. She is packed and ready to go at a moment's notice. We sure hope she doesn't have to go, and that the firefighters can get a handle on the various fires.



While we were in LA, I became an Angelina, according to my daughter.  I don't really think it works like this, but her statement came as a result of my having seen Angelyne.

She is hard to miss.

My husband and daughter were inside a store and I took the opportunity to sit outside on the steps of the store and soak up the skin-cancer rays vitamin D. This Pepto Bismol Corvette pulled up in front of the store, and the woman inside, with clouds of blonde hair, sat there for about 10 minutes, reading through some papers. And then she left.

I thought nothing of it since lots of people in LA look for ways to get attention, but when I told Sarah about the pink car, she said that I had seen a famous LA celebrity. She is now in her 60s, so she probably doesn't look exactly like her billboard, but she is still, apparently, a local personality. It was her goal to be famous, so years ago, she paid for billboards to advertise herself, and made herself a celebrity for being ... a celebrity? (According to the Googles, she sings and acts. Or used to.)

The conversation inside the store was one that might happen only in LA. My daughter was in line behind an actor, but she didn't notice him. The cashier pointed him out after he left the store, and then told Sarah that Angelina Jolie's kids had just left, but that other than them, they had only had "B-listers" in shopping, no "A-listers."  

I wonder who decides who is who. Who is whom?

Exteriors

Disney, LA

The Petersen Automotive Museum, LA

I love wandering around LA and looking at the buildings.  These are two of my favorites.

Back from LA

We just returned from a visit with younger daughter, who celebrated her one-year anniversary of brain surgery! Yay S! The surgery was successful, with only a minor hearing loss as a result of removing an acoustic neuroma on her left acoustic nerve.

Before we left Atlanta, I had tasked asked her to find this house:

It is Harry Bosch's house in the series Bosch on Netflix. The series is based on really good police dramas written by Michael Connelly. And yes, I do know that it is fiction, and that no one named Harry Bosch lives in this great house, but SOMEONE does; it exists and I want to see it.

Apparently younger daughter was not very motivated to find it because she DIDN'T.

She also has not watched (or read) the series because if she had, she would move out of LA.  It's dangerous there, y'all!!!


Anyway, we had a nice visit, even though her plans to keep us busy while she was at work didn't quite work out. She had suggested that we go to the Rain Room at LACMA, but when we looked for the hours it was open on Monday, we learned that it was closed for a couple of weeks, no explanation given.

OK, we'll go see the newly-opened Frank Lloyd Wright house on Monday. On Monday we looked up the hours....not open on Monday or Tuesday, the only days we had left to go there.

Our next stop, the Broad, a new museum of contemporary art, was a no-go as well. Because it's relatively new, tickets were sold out for a month or so in advance. Standby tickets only....

We did go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market and that was entertaining, more for the people there than for the stuff for sale, but the best thing was this:

A friend who saw the photo of this funnel cake topped with powdered sugar and chocolate sauce asked me if the apple dessert was good. Hah! It was Mother's Day.  Who eats good-for-you stuff on Mother's Day? No apples here.

We did also make it to see the amazing cars at the Petersen Automotive Museum. What I loved was the stairway that was designed specifically for the museum:

Sort of looks like a weirdly-shaped hubcap, doesn't it?

We also made it to the BEACH!!! Saltwater, waves, sand, my favorite place to be. But the weather was not ideal...isn't it always sunny in Los Angeles?  (Nope, just in Philadelphia.) We experienced what the locals call "May Gray." The temperature was in the 60's so that was nice, but we only saw sun the last two days we were there, and not until after about 4:30. But that's ok; it was still the beach.

Santa Monica Pier

Now, back to TV (Remember? I mentioned the Bosch series?). There is a new version of Burn Notice on television, but it isn't about a spy and it doesn't take place in Miami and it has a different cast. It's about...hard to say. It is The Catch on ABC.

The plot is convoluted and totally unrealistic, just like the plot of Burn Notice, and it's a pretty show set, not in Miami, but in LA, where it IS always sunny in TV land. The people are pretty; the settings are pretty; the clothes and jewels and cars are pretty. But there is one thing that distracts me:

Mereille Enos's eyelashes.  

Holy Smokes! No one's eyelashes are that long. And we know they are fake because she doesn't have them on when she is in her AMAZING home. 

So, I watched this show and then started noticing all the really, really long eyelashes on other actresses. Real people don't wear false lashes this long, right?

Wrong. In LA they do and I saw some in the wild, so to speak, on a saleslady in a store we went to. It's like seeing a new bird species! I can add them to my life list.


And I can add this:

  
We were stopped at a red light when we saw this man on the opposite side of the light. He rides this, in LA traffic.

Brave man?  Or crazy man? I report, you decide. 

Michael Jackson, BBB and Parallel Parking

What do these three things have in common?  Normally, nothing, but today I PARALLEL PARKED, almost perfectly, all by myself. (Not entirely. My daughter was in the car shouting instructions, but I ignored her.)

We wanted to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond, and the one closest to her is in HOLLYWOOD, y'all! On Vine, as in Hollywood and Vine. So off we went and we found a spot right outside of BBB. When I got out of the car to admire my parking skill (who parallel parks anymore?), I noticed the star we were next to.

Good old Michael's.

I was surprised that there weren't lots of tourists/fans standing around sobbing and taking photos and that there weren't flowers on it. Daughter says that there usually are flowers.

We walked around the block looking at the stars, and I had no idea who a surprising number of the stars thereby honored were. I suppose that today's youths, like my daughter and younger, don't know either. 

Fame is fleeting. One minute you are a big deal, the next moment you are dead and forgotten, and in Michael's case, you end up memorialized next to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Um.....Maybe Try Harder?

A Poem:

Hey.

From LA.

Wow!

This boulder is a relatively new installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

It must be a little weird to walk under it, but it's very cool.

My LA daughter can probably guess where we're going next time I visit.

Scenes from Los Angeles

I just returned last night from LA where I had a great time visiting younger daughter.
Thank you, S!!!

Here are random scenes from the beautiful Left Coast:

This is taken from an outdoor table at the In and Out Burger joint near the airport. One of the runways was built so close to downtown that the planes fly in scary-movie close to the businesses in the area. Another unusual LA business---for those people so desperate for nicotine that they don't have time to park and shop for it.

Random art:

Scary, those hipsters...

???




The Pacific! We had beautiful weather and so a trip to the beach was perfect.
It's November! And the flowers are blooming!
A beautiful day at the Flea Market.

A very crowded day at the Flea Market.

And as Arnold would say, "I'll be back..."

Dear Younger Daughter,

Remember two years ago when I came out to visit? Well, before I left Atlanta, I bought what the salespeople told me were really "cool" shirts and that they were perfect for my visit to Los Angeles.

But when I got to LA and showed them to you, you rolled your eyes and sighed. You said, and I quote here: They look like something Reba McEntire would wear. I had no idea then what you meant, but I knew it wasn't good.

However now, thanks to a trip to the mall this morning, I discovered what Reba McEntire would wear because she has her own line of clothing! Who knew!!! (Example below) So I wandered through her collection and bought................................................................................................

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
nothing.

I still don't know what, other than the label, makes something something Reba McEntire would wear, but you can breathe a deep sigh of relief. When I come to LA next time, I won't be wearing her label.

More from LA

As younger daughter said, you wouldn't think that this is the sort of a business you would call based on an advertisement on a truck.

But there you are.

The Hotel

Three days before we were to leave for Los Angeles, we received an e-mail from the hotel chain where we had reservations for free nights (because we had points from my husband's work travel) stating that the hotel was no longer a part of the _________________chain and that we should contact the current management to see if they would honor our reservations.

Well, no they wouldn't. But they would give us a special rate. Our daughter checked on a site called Yelp to make sure the hotel was a good one, but apparently it was not; one reviewer said that it was dingy and another said he would give it a zero but zero wasn't included as a ratings choice.

Yes, we should have checked this out before we made reservations, but, hey, free is free. (Never again!)

Our daughter found another hotel just a few blocks from her apartment. It was a boutique hotel. How fancy. It was, according to Yelp, being renovated and was a good place to stay, but was not entirely finished. The hotel rooms looked quite nice in the pictures on the website.

They did not look like this:It was a boutique hotel only if boutique means barely bare bones. My husband spoke to Jason, the very nice manager, about how it seemed as if someone had gotten started renovating, and then just stopped. For example, he said, there was no dresser.

Jason said that the designer for the hotel had never designed a hotel before (and you hired him because?) and that the designer's vision was for a very clean, very uncluttered space. The lack of a closet and a dresser means that the room will be anything but uncluttered, with no place for guests to put their things. But Jason did say that other guests had mentioned the lack of a dresser, and that he would get us one by the afternoon. Now that is five star service!

The whole place seemed to have been furnished from IKEA and we chuckled as we pictured a hotel employee with an Allen's wrench muttering as he put together our IKEA dresser. But that's not how things went.

When we returned to our room later in the afternoon, we found this letter:

So we weren't getting a new dresser at all. We were getting one taken from the room of a departing guest. AND, as you can see, it wasn't a dresser - it was a rather small, very wobbly armoire, placed awkwardly in the corner.




The only camping I would consider doing would be at a motel with a black and white TV and this was just a little too close to camping for me. Or maybe a youth hostel. (I'm old. I get to be fussy.)

The room did have:

A rod to hang clothes on
A functioning bathroom
A bathtub, apparently recycled, complete with lots of cigarette burns on the edge
A cup-at-a-time coffee maker
Air conditioning
A recycled door to the hallway; it had many, many holes in it from previous signs mounted to the inside
A television (color)


The room did not have:

A closet
Kleenex
Enough towels
Cups for the coffee from the cup-at-time coffee maker
Cups or glasses for water

As we drove around the area, we noticed other hotels. When I go back to LA, I think I will check those out. Although if the hotel we stayed in is ever really finished, I would give it another try. It was convenient and the staff was very enthusiastic. In an ineffective sort of way.

I LOVE LA!!!

It's beautiful!

There are flowers at the beach....

Flowers everywhere!

It's colorful.

View from our hotel window:
It has a sense of humor!

And take my word for it, the weather is perfect!!!

I could live here.

But I couldn't afford to live here.....sniff, sniff, sniff...

Dear Whoever is in charge of these things,

Dh and I are going to Los Angeles tomorrow to visit younger daughter. I would really appreciate it if there were NO EARTHQUAKES while we are there.

Thank you very much.

Very tremblingly,

Knittergran

Knittergran

Another Odd Business

Younger daughter, who lives in LA and who has introduced me to odd little-known businesses, told me about a van she saw driving through the city. On the side is a sign saying Post-Rapture Pet Care.

No joke. I looked on Google and discovered that there are post-rapture pet care businesses all over. I even found one in the UK.

I am not a rapture scholar, and so I don't know much about it, but what I can figure out from reading some of the advertising is that when the rapture happens, all the good people, the true believers, will go off someplace (the sky?) and the pets they own will be left behind.

To the rescue come the atheists. A number of the ads promise that the staff are all atheists, and since they will be left behind too, they will take care of the pets of those who have been whisked away.

Sort of brings to mind what has been mistakenly attributed to P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute, ..."

I do wonder if they actually have clients.

[photo: Google Images]

And Now For Something Completely Different

Last year when I went to LA to visit younger daughter, I had a list of things I wanted to do and see. At the top of the list, of course, was to go to the ocean. I am always happiest at the edge of a large body of salt water. Sigh…..

The second thing on my list was to see the La Brea tarpits. I imagined black, goopy tar, as far as the eye could see. My daughter, when I once asked her if she had seen them, said that she had passed them on her way to a job site. I thought that she must have gone very far from downtown LA to have passed the huge tarpits.

So here are the La Brea tarpits.
Yup. That’s them…
That’s all she wrote.

A very small pond with sculptures of a mastodon family about to go to their doom, sinking into the tar. Sniff…sniff….so sad. And note the soda can on the ground. Tourists chuck all sorts of things over the fence, apparently hoping to see them sink into the tar. Nice...

There is a museum next to the tar pond. Inside is a history of the discovery/exploration of the tarpits, and hundreds – really hundreds - of skeletons of animals, some now extinct, found in the tarpits.
The tarpits used to be huge, but now most of it is covered by Los Angeles itself. Los Angeles is built over the tarpits. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible; how do they keep buildings, really heavy buildings, from sinking in the tar? I don’t know, but apparently the architects and engineers do. My daughter says that in some parking lots that are beneath the buildings, tar seeps up through the concrete.

The funny thing (to me – I have a weird sense of humor) was the glass wall through which we observed archaeologists/scientists at work. They sit, facing the tourists, at tables right against the glass wall, and work at scraping/studying/reassembling the bones of the animals. In front of each person is a sign stating his title and what he does. I expected a Please Do Not Tap on the Glass sign. (There wasn’t one.)

So that’s it, the great La Brea tarpits. Next time you’re in LA, go check them out. Just don’t tap on the glass..... or try to feed the scientists.

fire water burn

I have borrowed this post from my younger daughter, who is just about at the three-year anniversary of moving to LA. The fires burning now are the worst she has seen since she has lived there. We check with her every day to see how it is affecting her-she has had to get an inhaler to breathe normally now because the smoke and particulates in the air are so heavy.
Anyway, here is her take on it and a link to some time lapse photography of the smoke.

i still have not adjusted to fires. i know they are a fact of life in southern california, but to me, it is a complete oddity to be driving around with smoke filling the air around you.

tonight's drive home from work was the best/worst of it yet. more of the hills are on fire and it is more visible from where i am. the smoke is filling all of the hills north of me, and almost every ridge is filled with spots of flames. what's unfathomable to me is that they keep saying, "this would be so much worse if the santa anas were blowing. if they were, this would be the true disaster that we've been predicting."

and because it's so odd to me, i don't see how the city keeps on functioning. in my mind, we should all be standing outside just watching. or if i had my way, i'd be up on one of the high floors in one of my mid-wilshire buildings watching.

i can't imagine that just 20 miles north of me, people are losing every thing they own. that the landscape is being scorched. that firefighters are waging what has become an unending battle against the flames. every day we wake up and find out it has only gotten worse in the night. i'm trying to find some good side, and I’m not able to.

Check here for the time-lapse photography. It's pretty frightening.
And here for this morning's pictures from my daughter's blog.

She sells spells?

Down by the seashore?

Nope, in LA.

When I visited younger daughter in LA last year, we came across this business as we drove around sightseeing. I wanted a photo of it, but traffic didn't allow us to stop. We planned on going back to get a picture, but weren't in this area again.

Two days ago my daughter was in a garage across the street getting work done on her car and took this picture for me. I asked her to go over and buy a spell and she said, No, that it would probably be expensive.

Expensive!!!!! For what? She would essentially be buying.....uh.....NOTHING!!!

Candles, incense, oils....those you can buy. But spells??? I don't believe so.

When I go back, I'm going to go here (apparently they will still be in business recession or no recession) and see what's up. What can I say - the idea of it fascinates me.

And on the topic of all things nutty: older daughter told me that she saw something about one of the Atlanta housewives going regularly to a palm-reader. Just how much can her palm change from one appointment to the next?

But maybe I'm wrong and Hamlet was right when he said,

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Sorry, Hamlet. Spells? Palm-reading? Nope. Nutty.

Congratulations!

Two years ago in September, younger daughter crammed as much as possible in her Honda Civic and drove alone (scary for her mother) from Atlanta to Los Angeles to start a new job. She had wanted to move there for a long time, and finally all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. A friend already out there needed a new roommate and called S. S researched the top architecture and design firms there, sent out resumes and flew out for interviews.

She was immediately offered a job by one of the top five firms in Los Angeles! She started September 12th, 2006, and it has been a rush towards the top since then.

Yesterday she received a whopping promotion! The only jobs above her are: director and then own-your-own firm.

S - Stand in front of a mirror, pat yourself on the back for us, and then, while pumping your fist in the air, say what your nephew says, "I did it!"

Congratulations!!!!!



(Sorry, S, about the photo. It's the best one I had in my computer)