The Palisades Fire - Personal Connections And More General Thoughts

We're back in Anchorage.  As we went to the airport in the late afternoon Friday, there seemed to be a lot less smoke blowing from the Palisades fire toward the ocean.   By the time we took off, it was dark out and while we sat on the wrong side of the plane, we could still see the flames through the window on the other side as we banked to the north.  It was the first time we saw actual flames.  

I grew up in LA and my mom lived in our house for 65 years.  So I know the area fairly well.  Especially the west side where the Palisades fire is.  I've seen huge changes over time and I have some thoughts, having been in LA when the fire started.  

We discovered KCAL on the radio while we were driving - which had the most up-to-the-minute and detailed coverage of the fires.  You can watch the KCAL coverage here.  I listened again this morning from here in Anchorage.  I know the places they're talking about, but even if you don't it's pretty addicting and I don't recommend watching more than 15 minutes at a time.  

History - Marquez, Will Rogers State Park, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier

Here's a recent map from the Los Angeles County Emergency site.  These maps keep being updated.  I've done a screenshot of an area of importance to me.  The orange is mandatory evacuation areas.  The yellow is a warning area - be ready to evacuate.  I'd note I was still getting alerts on my phone as we were headed to the airport.  

My mom's house is down at the bottom, just below the Santa Monica Airport which is the border between SM and Los Angeles.  It's a long way off from the mandatory evacuation area.  It probably doesn't look that far, but the fire is mostly in mountainous areas - large lots, hillsides covered with (now) dry brush.  The land between mandatory evacuation and be ready to evacuate areas and my mom's house is much more urban.  Directly above my mom's house is the concrete and asphalt runway of the Santa Monica Airport.  

I went to school at UCLA.  As you can see, the Evacuation Warning area touches the northwest corner of the campus.

My last two years at UCLA, I was a noon duty aide and afterschool playground director at Marquez Elementary School.  It's one of two schools that burned down Thursday.  Every day, about 11:30am I took off from UCLA and rode along Sunset to Marquez Elementary School.  Sometimes I napped in the nurse's office between lunch and after school duty.  Other times I rode the last mile or so of Sunset to the beach where I played volley ball and body surfed.  

One of my favorite places in LA was Will Rogers State Park.  This was the great Cherokee cowboy/actor/humoristc's estate where he could escape Hollywood.  It had his house and other buildings including a large stable for horses and a polo field.  And the surrounding area had beautiful hiking trails.  It was pretty much the only thing around when I first went there.  I remember seeing quail there.  This picture is from a 2011 blog post.  More pictures of the area around the Will Rogers estate are in a 2021 post.  It appears to have all been destroyed.  Will Rogers died in a plane crash with Wiley Post, in 1935 outside of what was then called Port Barrow, Alaska.  

If you don't know much about Rogers, I urge you to read his Wikipedia entry.  And/or watch this Youtube talk from 1931 much of which applies today.  

In more recent years, when I come down to LA, I bike down to Venice Beach and then north along the coast up to the where Pacific Palisades meets the ocean.  In the previous post, I put up a picture from a recent ride, looking up at a couple of houses on the bluff above the ocean there.  

The Santa Monica Pier, which is just about where the SA of Santa Monica are on the map, has also been a favorite spot in the LA area.  We took the grandkids to the pier on New Year's Eve before going to see Cirque Du Soleil which was in a tent in the pier parking lot.  And the pier is still there and likely not in danger, despite earlier reports that it was, and what almost certainly was a fake photo of the pier with the sky full of flames behind it. Though the Cirque Du Soleil tents are gone.  

On Wednesday, the second day of the fire, I biked (with a good mask on) to the pier and a little beyond it.  Here's a video I took from the pier.  Downtown Santa Monica is where the  tall buildings are to the right.  

Today's map has the evacuation line right up to the ocean for a good part of it.  But at downtown Santa Monica, the air was relatively clear and was still reasonably so a couple of miles north or the pier.  I rode beyond the pier until I could see that up ahead the smoke was down on the highway and bike trail.  I didn't need to get that close to thick smoke.  But you can see, in the picture below, a runner, without a mask, heading for it.  I'd note that as a Jr. High and High School students, LA air frequently looked like that and on the worst days, we'd get a pain in our chest when we breathed deep.  

I'd also mention that Pacific Palisades was the home of "Weimar on the Pacific."  

"In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism."

If you don't know these names (and I acknowledge that most people probably don't, despite their being important cultural figures), and others mentioned in the linked book announcement, I'd urge you to google them.  They're pretty remarkable people.  My mother had connections to Schoenberg family through her work, and through the owner of the dress shop who was featured in the film Woman In Gold. who hired Schoenberg's grandson to represent her in her fight against the Austrian government to recover pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis.  My mom shopped at her store and sent me clippings from the newspaper of the lawsuit while it was happening.  

Another member of the group was Leon Feuchtwanger.  When I was a high school or college student, my father took me to visit an older German woman in West Los Angeles or possibly Santa Monica.  Close to the yellow evacuation warning area today.  I could be wrong, but I believe this was Leon Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta.  (My father also fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.)

The End, But Not The End

I wanted this to be one integrated post, tying a number of different ideas together.  But while I think some of my readers could read on beyond this, I've got several more topics and there is already a lot in the links to explore.  So I'll save the others for tomorrow and maybe the next day.  

Coming:

1.  Development in the hills -  Why have people built way up in this area known for fires?

2.  Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and now Brentwood ( especially Mandeville Canyon), Encino on the valley side are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, probably the US.  Would we be paying such close attention if this were a poorer neighborhood?  Would a poorer neighborhood be getting all the resources coming in to help like this?

3.  The idea of ownership and loss - humans are short term inhabitants on earth.  We don't 'own' the earth, or anything else really.  We are the temporary guardians until the 'properties' are lost, sold,, destroyed, stolent, or by the death of the people who believe they own them.  

4.  Phone Alerts  - I kept getting loud alerts on my phone with warnings to evacuate immediately

5.  How television news (in particular) distort reality by showing the most sensational snippets and ignoring the fact that most people are going on with their lives normally.

6. Warning to Anchorage hillside residents, and people everywhere who live in wooded hillsides. Or any area that is threatened by nature's reaction to Climate Change.  

Parts Of LA Are Burning

 It was very foggy several days ago, from what I could tell, mostly within three or four miles of the coast.  

So, this afternoon, as we were driving home from errands that got us as far east as Beverly Hills, and we saw a wall of clouds off to the west, I assumed it was a fog bank.  Though it looked a bit odd, and it seemed to be more north and to the south was still clear.  

When we got home, I walked around the block to take some pictures.  

We were listening to KJZZ, and didn't hear any news of the Palisades fire.  It was pretty windy, and I thought the off shore wind was keeping the fog to the coast.  

It was much later that we heard about the fire.  And then, as I was reading about the fire, almost midnight - an alarm went off on my phone.  

We're about six or seven miles, as the crow flies from the Palisades.  Malibu is even further.  When I bike to the beach and then north through Santa Monica and to Will Rogers State Beach (back in Los Angeles), Pacific Palisades is above the ocean.  Those areas are up in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains.  We're down in more city area.  

Here's a picture of a couple of houses up on the bluff at Pacific Palisades from my bike ride along the ocean the other day.  

But I did just go outside and while the moon is bright, the air is starting to get smoky.  

And we've had three more alarms go off on my phone.  The last one is for folks in Topanga Canyon to be ready to get out.  

And another alarm just went off but I didn't get a screen shot.  The alarms really screech.  It's 1:15am.  I really don't think we're in any danger.  When I was growing up, we would see the red glow up in the hills, but it never got out of the hills.  

But these are different times.  I probably should leave my phone on, just in case.  But I don't think I'll get much sleep if I do.  

Our tickets back to Anchorage are for Friday night.  

Here's the LA County Emergency map for right now.  We're about where the black star is.  That looks much closer than I realized.  But that orange blotch along the ocean is the evacuation area, NOT the fire area.  There is all of Santa Monica between the evacuation area and us.  As you can see there is another fire to the east.  But I'll leave my phone on.  It's 1:30 am as I post this.  

Agave, The Beach, Ethiopian Food, Bumps

 I'd like to write a post about key problems our democratic system hasn't been able to handle - like preventing a convicted rapist, etc. from being elected president.  Not the comparatively less important issues that pop up on social media and mainstream media headlines focused on this or that person or event, but the truly serious systemic failures.  The inability of the justice system to mete out timely justice to a well financed presidential candidate.  The inability of the First Amendment to cope with propaganda magnified by social media which rewards people for spreading lies and outrage, and enables foreign enemies to stoke fears and spread dissension.  

But that's a much longer post that requires a lot of documentation.  

So I was just going to put up some photos today

Agave

I wrote succulent on the photo titles, but agave was also in my head.  The link above on agave proved me right.  The first one is down the street. 

The second one is in my mom's front yard.  They don't bloom that often, but when they do they're impressive.  This flower is about 9 feet long.  I'm not sure how, in this droughty climate, it manages to stay upright.

There was a humming bird filling its tank, but it didn't wait around for me to get my phone out.  

There are speed bumps on the street, but these natural obtrusions - the roots from the Italian Stoney Pine trees - are much more effective.  If you don't navigate this just right, your car is going to make serious noises as the bottom hits elevated parts of the street.  There are others with cones up the street, but this one goes almost all the way across the street.  Where the cone is, it's higher than the curb.  

We hear this all the time, even cars going very, very slowly.  You have to go all the way over to this side of the street to get by without notifying the neighbors that you are there.  And then there are the cars that don't slow down before hitting this.  

This is a good example of the importance of good government.  The cost to drivers - at repair shops and then increased insurance costs - probably will be greater than the cost of repairing the street.  Though the street has been repaired and the roots come roaring back.  Other benefits of a good government are less tangible. Say the benefits of a good school system.  You just don't see the immediate effects of a bad school system the way you see (and hear) the impacts of these gnarly streets.  

It's also a reminder that if people disappeared, much of human activity would be hidden by nature reclaiming its space.  

We had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.  Underneath is the bread - injera - a spongy, pliable food that you tear off and use to scoop up the food.  We ordered two vegetarian combos and one serving of lamb.  (In the middle.) We also got extra injera  to use until we could easily get to the injera underneath.  

On Fairfax, between Pico and Olympic, is a row of Ethiopian restaurants and shops.  

Today (Monday) the ladies drove to the beach and I biked down to meet them.  It's not exactly warm by LA standards - in the mid to high 50sF - and there seemed to be a mix of fog and haze in the distance in most directions.  But there's something about sitting on the sand and having the waves pounding.  Enough to lure this guy in the picture into the surf.  I used to swim all year as well when I was a student at UCLA.  I worked as a noon duty aid and after school playground director at an elementary school in Pacific Palisades.  All my classes were early morning.  Between lunch and afterschool, I'd honda down to the beach where a regular group of guys played volleyball and body surfed.  

This guy was sitting with his bike and surfboard a little in front of us.  At some point he was getting ready to leave.  He pulled out a brush and started brushing sand off everything - the surfboard, the backpack, his wetsuit, his feet before putting on his shoes.  Then got the surfboard strapped onto the backpack and made his way to the boardwalk.  

I just wiped the sand off my feet with my hands before I put on my shoes and biked home.  But I'm intrigued by his use of the brush.  

The Good And The Bad Of Today's Alaska Airlines Trip To LA [UPDATED]

You don't need to read this.  I just need to get it out of my system.  

[UPDATE Monday, Dec 16, 2024:  We each got a $75 discount code for for future flights.  This is fine with us since Alaska is our basic airline.]  

We had tickets (from Anchorage) to Seattle for 10:35am getting to Seattle at 3:11pm (You lose an hour going Anchorage to Seattle)

Then an LA leaving at 4:56pm arriving in LA at 7:45pm

The first delay notice was to 11am departure.

Then 12:20pm

Then 3:00 pm

We had this experience about a year and a half ago trying to catch a non-stop to Chicago.  After many delays, the flight was cancelled and we had to fly through Seattle about 10 hours late.

At this point we've been on the phone to Alaska Airlines changing our LA flights.  Then we got a notice that the LA flight was cancelled.  We were still in Anchorage.  

There was an announcement that another flight was taking off to Seattle at Gate 6.  We walked to Gate 6 and asked if we could get on it.  It was almost noon.  We could.  And we got two seats together.  But we had to get on right away and couldn't redo the LA flight from Seattle. 

Alaska had also sent us four $12 vouchers for today at ANC or SEATAC.  

When we landed at 4:30pm I texted Alaska Airlines and they quickly had us rebooked on a 5:58pm flight to LA.  Just enough time to use our coupons to get some yakisoba and board the plane.  

In the end, we landed in LA an hour later than originally scheduled.  

LAX a couple of years ago banned taxis and Lyft and Uber from the terminals and put them in their own spot.  So you can't get out of the terminal and grab a cab.  There are shuttle busses or you can walk.  When we've waited for the shuttle it's been a long wait, so we walked about 25 minutes.  Then there was a long line waiting for cabs.  It's a poor solution to the jam of Uber and Lyfts that caused them to do this.

But we're here, at my mom's house and the kids and grandkids are due when their schools are out.  So I'm not really complaining.  Just reporting.  

It seems that Alaska is able to quickly change things by phone, but people waiting at the counters seemed to have more difficulties.  And when our flight was changed to 3pm, why couldn't they move us to the other flight that had some empty seats and was leaving 3 hours earlier?  If we hadn't walked over, the plane would have left with at least two empty seats if not more.  

So I'm impressed with being able to book online or by phone so quickly.  And I realize that things happen and planes need repairs that delay them.  Though at one point I had to delete my app and then download it again because it stopped showing the changes we'd made.  

Our original flight didn't leave until 3:15pm.  We got to LA an hour after the original flight landed in Seattle.  

I'd also add that that if you are MVP, you get a phone number that seems to be answered much faster than the regular phone number.  We haven't flown that much in the last few years - not enough to get MVP - but Alaska has extended so called elite flyers status during COVID.  This year they let you get to that magic 20K miles using miles gained through use of your Alaska Airlines VISA card.  

And the people who answer the phone are soo polite and competent.  

Sunsets - Human And Solar

The sun went down as we were driving back from visiting an old friend of my mother's.  And when I say old, I'm not exaggerating.  E is 99.  She lives alone in her home, though her daughter lives not far away.  She walks well.  She looked good - certainly not anything like 99.  She talks like she always has.  Hearing's a problem, but her daughter was there and used voice transcription on her phone to help out.  She gave up driving a few months ago when there was a problem with the steering wheel that she decided not to get fixed.  I've known her at least 65 years.  It was a delightful get-to-gether.  She's one of the last of my mother's generation still kicking.

Even driving in LA traffic, nature puts on amazing shows.  

While it's been sunny and the air has been clear (you can see the snow capped mountains to the east and Catalina Island to the west), it's been a bit nippy for LA (I'm using Santa Monica weather on my phone) - in the 50s (F) today.  I did various odds and ends around the house as we get ready to return home and by 3pm I'd put off my bike ride to the beach. Chilly. But a call to a friend in Anchorage embarrassed me and I put on a windbreaker over my sweatshirt and got on the bike a little after 4pm and rode down to Venice Beach.  The sun was directly in my eyes when there weren't trees blocking it.  I had a right taillight blinking in hopes that blinded cars could see me in the bike line.  Most people biking, skateboarding, scootering, and walking had on sweatshirts and warm coats.  But there were a few bare chested runners as well.  

The sun was getting very close to the horizon - which means there's about 30-40 more minutes of daylight.  The surf was low.  This is just north of Venice in Santa Monica.  

And this is turning around with my back to the sun and the bike and my shadows stretched way out.

And finally, as I went up Rose Avenue from the Venice Boardwalk, I turned around to get one last picture.  This time I was able to get the building to block the main part of the sun.  

And I was home a little after 5.  

New Year's Day Birds

We dropped the family off at the airport Monday.  It was a beautiful sunny day with blue skies and t-shirt temperatures. The sky was clear and you could see snow up on Mt. Baldy. We like walking along Ballona Creek, but thought since we were coming from the airport we could start at the ocean end.  

There's a bike trail along the creek that goes at least to Culver City and connects with the beach trail south to nearly Palos Verdes.  North, it goes through Marina Del Rey and then connects with Venice and Santa Monica trails.  I've marked in red our walk from the beach to Lincoln and back.  

We saw the hummingbird hovering first.  It's iridescent ruby throat flashing brilliantly.  It flew off and then quickly returned an lighted on this high bush.  I'm still fighting my auto-focus on my Canon Rebel.  I've read instructions, but the auto-focus has trouble figuring out exactly where I want to focus.  For most things it's not an issue, but for birds far away or tiny birds relatively close, it's frustrating.  I'm open to links that could help.  I left the image small because you can see how out-of-focus the bird is when I cropped it bigger.  

And I couldn't get the iridescent flash, though you can see the emerald wing suggesting it.  

The egret is much bigger and easier to get in focus.

I was fascinated by the egret's toes as it started walking.  It didn't respond to my request that it get a less difficult background.  You have to look carefully.  I counted four toes.  

I originally thought these might be sanderlings, but the legs seemed the wrong color.  Maybe a type of sandpiper.  I couldn't tell for sure.  

The water here is where the marina opens to the Pacific, not the Ballona Creek side of the trail.  You can check here.

I'm guessing this is a white pelican, but you can check yourself. 

You may have read about large waves this weekend in Southern California.  The waves didn't seem huge, but they crashed pretty much straight down.  The bike trail on he beach was covered with sand and the high tide lines were way, way up on the beach.  

 

Clouds! (It's Been Rainy In LA)

 I was out in the car yesterday when it started raining so hard I had the windshield wipers to the fastest speed and I still had trouble seeing through the wet on the windshield.  

Sun did make cameo appearances throughout the day.  

Today it was sunny when I got up - though there were lots of exciting clouds, ranging from white to almost black.  

This iris opened since yesterday and the sun seemed like a good opportunity to get on my bike  for a ride along the beach.  

This is the last block on Rose Ave as you get to the beach in Venice.  The border between Los Angeles (Venice is a neighborhood in LA) and Santa Monica is about a block to the north (to the right in the picture).

Parts - not many - of the bike trail had a couple of inches of water and some sand.  

Headed north, Santa Monica pier is up ahead. 

There are a few wooden walkways from the bike trail to near the water.  I wanted some pictures from near the water.  Above I'm looking north.

Below I'm looking west. 

And below I'm looking south back toward the pier.  This is NOT a black and white photo.

It was at this point, as I was picking my bike up out of the sand, that a life guard in a truck came over to me and said that NOAA reported there was a thunderstorm due in the next half hour and to clear the beach.  (There weren't that many people out anyway, only a few down by the water.)

At this point I felt the first rain drops.  The temperature was in the low to mid 60s F and felt warmer when the sun was on me.  

As I rode back, the palm trees along the palisade in downtown Santa Monica were nicely silhouetted.  

And below I'm approaching the Santa Monica pier from the north.  I hadn't seen the ferris wheel turning when I passed by the first time and it certainly wasn't moving now.  Nor did I see any action on the roller coaster.  

It never rained too hard, despite the ominous clouds.  Some blue and some hint of sun if not actual sun were always visible.  

On the way home I stopped at the 99 Cents store.  But most of the shelves were empty. The cashier said January 5 would be their last day.  They did have produce.  Two avocados, an artichoke, and some broccoli cost me $2.  

When I got near home, it wasn't raining, but there was water gushing down the hill to the flat area.  It had rained very hard while I was gone, but not where I was.  Later my granddaughter took this picture when it rained heavily again and you can see some of the rain coming down, though the picture doesn't capture how hard it was raining.  

The rain seems to have fallen here and there over short periods of time as clouds moved through.  The following list shows rainfall in inches as of 7am Thursday for the five days prior.  There's a lot of variation and this doesn't count what fell yesterday and today.  

Oxnard 6.13

Porter Ranch 4.82

Culver City 3.43

Westlake Village 3.31

Downtown LA 1.98

Bel Air 3.27

Long Beach 1.24

Van Nuys 4.30

Santa Monica 1.80

Northridge 4.54

Whittier 1.51

Pasadena 1.61

Castaic 2.53

I found different numbers when I googled Los Angeles annual rainfall. (Some variation is surely due to location.)  But the range was between 12 and 14 inches!

This is all a reminder that the earth itself is doing fine.  The changes brought on by climate change, the loss of species, are irrelevant to Nature.  The landforms and oceans will survive and evolve without us.  

The coming climate catastrophes are only catastrophes in the eyes of humans.  I'm not sure what the animal and plant species that are being threatened know or feel.  The earth has experienced many changes over its billions of years.  Our hominid ancestors only appeared around seven million years ago.  And individual human lives are like flashes of lightening (which I never did see today) in comparison.   

So go out into nature and learn.  

Headed Home

 Now that we're at LAX waiting for our 7:20 pm non-stop back to Anchorage, we had the most beautiful day since we got here. Thanks to my mom's neighbor who drove us to the airport!   I did get in a bike-ride to the beach (stopping to duplicate some keys on the way).  

Not only was it warmer than it's been (low 70s) but clear too.  Though to the south you could see fog/clouds/haze.  This is looking north toward the Santa Monica mountains (really hills.)  I've been to a lot of places and I'm only now truly appreciating the great beaches of LA.  Not that I didn't always love the beach growing up, but I never appreciated the huge expanse of sand between the water and the buildings.  There's a lot of sand.  No rocks.  In the picture the water is to the left.  You can see a thin band of water between the sand and the sky.  

This African iris was sticking out from the wall of green between my mom's house and the neighbor's.  The plant itself was way inside, but the flower found the light.  It wasn't there yesterday.

These oranges were weighing down a tree in front of an apartment building in Beverly Hills. If people had more edibles in their gardens here they could feed a lot of people 

An oak tree across the street from friends we visited Sunday.

It's been a different, pandemic trip.  We've gotten take out, but haven't dined in any restaurants like we normally would.  

And the ceiling at our gate at LAX this evening.

This has been, until this week, a pretty chilly visit, for LA.  But it's been chilly for Anchorage too while we were gone.  Our house sitter reported that our kitchen sink pipes froze, but he was able to get that taken care of.  

Looking forward to being home for a bit.  

Sun And Rain In LA Keep Me Distracted

 There's been a lot of rain here in LA.  For LA anyway.  It was one day rain, the next day sun, then rain.  We just finished two days of steady rain, but today the sun's out.  But with all this, trying to be on vacation yet get things done and gramping, I totally missed Wednesday's hearing.  And while the Superior court has it live on video, they don't leave the recorded (was it recorded?) video up for people to see later.  But they're still talking technical, procedural stuff.  Though listening in would have given me some hints of things might go.  Next meeting is next Wednesday.  But meanwhile here's some LA.

Sunday was sunny and I went for a bike ride with B, an Alaskan friend who's moved down here to be near kids and grandkids.  He took this picture of a house in Marina Del Rey.  This is NOT a typical house.  

It had this sign in the lower left.

Some gentlemen fishing at the boat docks in Marina del Rey.  

Monday morning it was still sunny, but clouds were rolling in as we went to Will Rogers State Park for a hike back into my earlier life.  This is where Will Rogers lived.  His house is there and there's a polo field that's active on weekends.  And also a trail that loops around the property.  

The rain was a fine mist by this point.

All tree bark fascinates me, but eucalyptus trees hold a special place

Here's Will Roger's stable/barn in the wet Monday.

And here it is when it was finished in 1927.

One of the things I like about this park is that it's surrounded by chaparral covered hills.  A smell that takes me back to childhood.  I think it might be why I like David Hockney's swimming pool picture, which I once had to recreate digitally in a computer art class I took.  It was painted at a house not far from here with hills like this in the background. I want you all to know I really liked this picture well before it sold for $100 million.  

In the past when I've hiked this trail I've seen coveys of California quail.  But not this time. 

It was raining when we went to the cemetery to put flowers on my mom's and other family members' graves.  When my brother died young, my mother went to the cemetery weekly to keep fresh flowers from her garden on his space on the wall.  My mom was a lab technician and X-ray technician and so she filled test tubes with water and taped them to the wall.  Many years later, the cemetery got plastic vases and put holders up on the wall.  My inlaws and step father were added to the wall, and more recently my mom.  So when I'm down here I gather flowers - mainly epidendrum, what my mom called 'poor man's orchids' and jade plants - because the last longer.  

A couple of years ago I filled some of the vases with soil and put  jade plant in.  When we came again nearly a year later, they were still alive.  One of the cemetery caretakers was making sure they got water.  Because of COVID I wasn't sure what I would find this time.  We haven't been there for almost two years.  But I shouldn't have worried.  Each vase had a healthy jade plant, one had a different succulent, alive and thriving.  We added the flowers we brought and I have to leave a thank you for the caregiver before we return to Anchorage.

Nearby my mom's spot is this one.  

Yesterday it was raining again.  I had an appointment in Beverly Hills with the eye doctor who's been checking my contacts since 1975.  I took my granddaughter with me and she had a number of questions.  

They had a COVID testing site in the parking lot.  

And most of the nearby shops (but not all) had very COVID warnings.

oops, this one needed higher res, sorry

These were near where we parked the car and I thought they were pretty.  Picture didn't turn out that well.

After we went by a park where both my wife and I attended summer camp.  We didn't know each other then at all.  We only found out we'd both been there when I found an old camp picture in my mom's garage, after she died.  I should my wife my 8 year old self and she then pointed out her own image on the picture.  

They've take out most of the features that made it a wonderful place for kids - different spaces separated by different kinds of bushes and a swimming pool on one end.  The pool is gone - the the playground there was blocked off yesterday by tape because there were several inches of water.  This trail was the nicest part of the park now - and it was a giant puddle.  Basically they wiped out all the park and put in two baseball diamonds.  

And driving home down Olympic, the clouds were playing hide and seek with the tops of the buildings in Century City.  

Today's sunny again, and so we have a bike ride scheduled.  We got the brakes fixed on my granddaughter's bike and she wants to use it.