lost in a forest...part deux

i rode the 5 miles on my squeaky old bike. listening to the Church, the White Stripes and Bowie on the way there. a grove of towering sequoias. a bed of pine needles and an old sarong. sucking in the majesty of the trees and getting my vampire on with Sookie. nibbling on almonds and watching an army of ants bum rush an artery of sap. a beautiful day...

just some stuff on a saturday...

i haven't been very interested in keeping up with the journal lately. but i'm trying to shake that a bit. i killed my garden errrr beastly hellaciously hot southern california killed my plants. and so did the night squirrrels aka the rats. and then there was the bad ass green worm army that knocked of my woad and nasturtiums. so now i have a dirt garden. it's nice and brown and guarded by a humble gnome with an ax. on the other hand, i am growing a rather beautiful strain of fungus in my terrarium.
i have been sequestered indoors because of the fires burning up the hill. the air stinks. greg doesn't smell it, but he smokes. my sniffer is in sneeze and blow mode. i'm over it. and i want to go running again and i want to turn off the canned air in the flat. i did brave riding my bike to the train on thursday. it felt great to get a little exercise even if every inhale smelled like a smoldering bbq pit. on that ride i learned that wearing a wrap dress to ride a bike is not exactly the best idea. several good citizens of pasadena and little tokyo definitely got a morning flash of my lily white upper thigh. i hope that it gave them a giggle! also on the train was a very odd and slightly off large woman panhandling and talking to her self. people did the bury their noses into their blackberry's in order to not to attract her attention. she plopped herself down into 1 1/2 seats and pulled out a hello kitty notebook and wrote two words. i strained to see what they were and what i could make out looked like:
elasticity pusssy(yes with extra esses)
that made my day!

bambino

this is my first little baby from the garden. sweet little lemon cucumber, how lovely you will taste sliced with some feta and sardines...

standin' in the shadow of the stinkiest flower ever

yeah, i know the shadow picture is kind of played and not so artful, yet i kinda like it. except that i look a little hippy. not hippie as in patchouli wearing, but wide, but i was carrying a big ol' purse and wearing a cardigan and it is an exagerated shadow and...anyhoo, sorry for the hip rant, greg and i went to see the very rare corpse flower. actually, we smelled it waaaaay before we saw it.
it did smell gross. but not like two day old cantelope rind in the garbage can gross or like my cousin russell's week old feet migraine inducing gross. it was a damp and musty and sickly sweet odor that permeated the air and zapped our nostrils. it was most incredible to take in(rare too) the last time one flowered at the huntington was in 2001. i should add that it was difficult to get a clear picture, because old folks were literally jumping in the way of the camera to get a closer look.

i've always been a closet anarchist...

photo courtesy of apartment therapy
guerrilla gardening...check it out here.

my secret garden under the clothesline...

this weekend was about movies, gardens, bike rides, new shoes, trying to pollinate my own veggies, dog park, books and what the...?...trying to pollinate my own veggies? for real. i am in dire need of some bees but bad. i need to add some special flora love for my little wing-ed friends. also, yes those are pink knickers hanging on the clothes line.
oh and growing in garden we have....
basil(sweet and purple)
thyme
watercress
french sorrel
dill
lemon balm
spearmint
german chamomile
rosemary
chocolate pepper
runner beans x 2
(one is a painted lady variety that was named after the 1st queen elizabeth...it's been around that long)
tomatoes x 3
lemon cukes x 2
patty pan squash x 2
and two lovely lavenders(french and spanish red) that i can hopefully manage to not destroy
oh, and last but not least...
a single woad plant(i am a dyer after all)
fingers crossed and i wants to plant more please!

happy earth day!!!

some morning pics of what i am trying to grow on my little patch of asphalt and roof. marshall l-o-v-e-s walking on the roof he feels like king of the castle. he also loves posing for the paparazzi. so this was a good morning for him. not shown were my lemon cukes, chocolate peppers and patty pan squash. fingers are crossed that they make it in this heat.

mistress mary...

mary mary quite contrary
how does your garden grow?
with silver bells and cockle shells
and pretty maids all in a row...

mary is mary, queen of scots and the silver bells refer to thumbscrews. the cockle shells
could be a reference to her husband (and his roving eye) or possibly yet another instrument of torture that would be attached to the ahem(!) genitals. and the pretty maids? maybe her ladies in waiting or maybe the guillotine. ahhh such sweet allegory in a lovely little rhyme...

50 million ideas and a grey sunday...

my weekends just don't seem to be long enough to do everything that i want to. it takes me at least a half day to just recover from the chaos of my previous weeks work. i am just counting the days until april when everything will simmer down a bit. i spent saturday evening finishing up bracelets for the boutique. i am pretty happy at how they are turning out, but as i am in such a creatively prolific period right now, i just want to crank out pieces like a machine. unfortunately, i am also easily distracted. this means that i also went thrifting(found a most excellent and huge mirror), poked around the library, played with the dog, broused at the nursery(picked up some mint and an heirloom tomato plant after much deliberation), and experimented with baking macarons(and failed miserably yet tastily!!!).
i also made a second visit to the "rat house." i was so in love with that apartment and i thought sure that it would be ours, but after less than five minutes in the place and hearing the movement in the walls i was running for the door. i had gone by myself this time just to listen and poke around and think about this maybe being the next place that g. and i would move to. scratch scccccrrrrraaaaattttcccchhh. it came from two different sides of the living room. one side being in the vicinity of the fireplace. it was such a creepy feeling...kind of like being watched and i was having flashbacks to watching salem's lot on tv as a kid and how the old scary house had vampires living their undead lives in the walls. spooooooky. vampires and/or rats are a real deal breaker, so greg and i will stay in our smaller apartment..stupid nosferatu...stupid fear of the plague.
i did manage to snap this pic in the mirror of the built-in in the dining room. this was literally seconds before the scratching and shuffling sounds in the walls started up.


took another trip to the huntington today with some friends. it was fun to act the part of bumbling docent and then to just sit on the lawn in a bed of clover and pass the afternoon.

a quiet morning...

this morning i am moving slowly after a brain numbing migraine yesterday. i have a short list of some things that i really would like to take care of today, but i can't quite move past drinking tea spiked with ginger slices and watering my outdoor potted plants that have hung on through the winter and the scourge of last summer. i was so thrilled to find chamomile and cilantro seedlings sprouting up from the soil last weekend. i figure, if i get an early enough start this year, then perhaps there will be hope of having some happy plants this summer. all i want is a simple little potted garden. sounds easy right? sighhhhhhhhhhh. i have limited space and intense sun. i have tried sunshades and different soils and peat and so on and so on...and so, this year the game plan is just to be an early bird. that's it.



also on today's docket in no particular:

• the purchase and application of hair dye from whole foods market
• pick up jewelry bits from my supplier
• hot soak in the tub
• library
• bake some scones or maybe macarons...i'm feeling bake~e~licious right now
  
• pick up seed packets to send to my beautiful 2 year old god daughter Amelia
  

maybe that's it...i would like to see coraline or the wrestler, but i'm not sure how my eyes and head will feel later. it would be nice for greg and i to have a date though.

a visit to my new "backyard"

i have become a member of the huntington library and gardens. this was a big decision for me as it is a little pricey to join(well just over a hundred dollars) and nowadays i am trying to crack down on errant money fumbles...but this is so worth it and just a bike ride away!
so today, even with the grey gloom, i wandered around for a bit and sat on a bench by the lily pond(pictured above) and tried to read my darwin biography. i couldn't concentrate though and it was a bit chilly so i walked around and found loads of cherry blossoms and beautiful dried up pomegranite bushes...and then, i remembered the "beautiful science" exhibit in the library. so instead of reading about darwin, i was able to examine some of his and other naturalists of that eras(and before) work. i love the self~portrait of me looking at hand blown glass bulbs that are AGES old and kept in a special box that allows them to be hooked up to electricity but will not drain them of their oldey timey juice. it looks like i am wearing a crown of stars...

gloomy beautiful sunday...

bless grey days in southern california. without them i think that i could well go off my head. they make me wax nostalgic on my time as a girl growing up in the rural countryside of pennsylvania. on grey spring days i would run through our back field pretending to be jane eyre traipsing across the moors. all i ever wanted to do was move to england. i tried to convince my mom that i should be enrolled in the study abroad/student exchange program. she refused on the basis that she just knew that i would be absolutely positively miserable. FIE on that...
today was also a day for retail thrift therapy. after hitting anthropologie yesterday and being in love/hate with everything(LOVE the aesthetic/HATE the price tag especially when i know what it costs to make these things...), i heard the soft psychic tug of st. vincent's beckoning.
i always have to heed the call. love ya st. vinny's.

trip to madison in october

here are some pictures from the incredible dr. evermore's scrap metal sculpture post apocalyptic blowin' my mind garden...

the sepia toned pictures are of the forevertron...it is straight out of a science fiction landscape

bringing the outside in or hobbit jars...

my terrarium collection:
i am so in love with these little micro-worlds. the large round one has been going since last june and it is literally thriving. the thing with my terrariums is that i like to have them exposed to air and not closed off in the more traditional sense. basically, that just means that i have to mist them lightly almost every day instead of once every week or so. sometimes little snails will sprout up and they are so tiny...smaller even than my pinky nail. i have an assortment of vintage bric-a-brac that i hide amidst the mini forests. i gave out three as christmas presents this year and they were really well received.