There’s a lunar eclipse! Right this minute! Here’s a pix of how it looks from Covina Avenue. [thx for the heads up, Laur]

A picture from today’s walk along Alamitos Bay. A pelican settled on a street lamp catches the low winter sun after 3 gray days.

Welcome 2008! Happy New Year to all. Here’s a little postcard for you: The holiday lights at the Marina on Alamitos Bay.

First a disclaimer: the fires are a major disaster for Southern California — 350,000 homes evacuated, more than 1000 homes are lost. And, though the winds are predicted to drop by Wednesday, things are far from over. But, for me personally — the fires have been just an irritant and an inconvenience. I am not […]

And the Los Angeles Times gets a double plus good for their great use of often updated Google Maps to give us an answer to the crucial question of the moment: am I surrounded in a burning ring of fire? They are actually delivering updates via the map — click one of the fire markers […]

1) I did not win a date with Bill Clinton. Boo. But Hillary’s Campaign Manager, Patti Solis Doyle writes to say she’ll send me an e-mail reminder of the debate and that I can console myself with a live blog from the debate watching party. Sigh. [original post]
2) I am getting less junk mail. It […]

It didn’t take Val and me long to become water-conscious when we moved to California — we came from the swamplands to the desert, so it was a pretty obvious transition; you could actually see that water was scarce here. So it was natural to turn off the water while we brushed our teeth, hand-water […]

Even without a moral charge to do so, I still regularly read an ink-on-wood old fashioned newspaper, The Grunion Gazette, which is dropped into my front garden every Thursday. I read it because, with its little office right around the corner from my house, it is pretty good at telling me what’s going on right […]

It’s grape preserve-making weekend at casa della vite grande. More images — and a recipe — to come.

It was 103° in Long Beach today, the hottest day since I moved here in 1989. [It tied the 1988 record temp.] It is still 89° at 8 p.m. Just too damn hot to say more.

A B-1B Lancer — like this one –flew over my block on Monday. The noise was incredible, weird and thrilling. Ajax did his thunder bark, hackles up, jumping and barking at the ceiling. I looked out the front window and there it was big and banking and low over the end of my block. It […]

Val takes in the first of our grape harvest. Click play to see him pick some grapes. If you cannot see the slideshow above, or wish to see a larger version of this slide show, click here.

arrives in Long Beach, CA.

God knows this isn’t what I thought I’d be doing with this painting, but after a long time studying the problem (See The painting I want, below) I realized that the mid-ground of the painting had grown too light — had lost all traces of its orange underpainting. The lightness of the area was pushing […]

Lick yourself a swamp cooler and hunker down. Mid 90s in LBC today and Ajax has the only AC in the house.

casts a blue eye on me.