Charles Jones, Not

It's not Charles Jones. It is a 10-foot-plus Russian mammoth sunflower we grew from last year's seed, which is a first here.

Compost Lesson #3

You'd think your composting would produce enough to replenish your garden soil. But in reality compost cooks down more than Swiss chard, and if you want enough to spread around even a small garden, you'll have to seek it elsewhere. Equestrian centers or rhyming craptonite couriers are your two best bets for buying large quantities of compost for cheap.

Scored!

The Next Whole Earth Catalog, 1981, purchased at Goodwill last weekend for $2.99. Available on eBay starting at about $30. Hours of delicious browsing, reading, ogling.
One highlight: editor Stewart Brand quoting life lessons from Buckminster Fuller: "Go only where invited; don't show unfinished work; reflect the physical world's honesty and all will go well."

Nominative Determinism

There's a small state park just south of Lucia, CA, which is just south of Big Sur, that has one of the most magnificent redwood forests I've seen. Nothing as big or out-of-the-way as the landscape Richard Preston describes in his enjoyable The Wild Trees, but still quite wonderful.

The redwood in this photo, and its skirt of descendants, siblings or maybe cousins, lives a 15-minute bike ride from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, worlds away—at least—from Big Sur. It's in a canyon where spotting a hiking celebrity is more likely than discovering a redwood tree. Which makes stumbling upon a tree like this that much more enjoyable.

As for the title of this post, my first name, Elon, means "tree" in Hebrew.

Compost Lesson #2

Corn husks break down slowly. There's no hurry.

Compost Lesson #1

[This is the first installment of what will be an ongoing, irregular series here.]
I wanted to post this photo as a counterpoint to the image in the previous post. I enjoy beauty as much as anyone—and sweets, of course—but I also enjoy compost and bugs.
The sectioned larvae pictured here will grow up to become soldier flies. They're quite welcome in my compost bin for two reasons: they assist with decomposition (precisely our purpose for having a bin) and they attract phoebes.
Phoebes will sit on a low perch near our compost bin and swoop down to snatch up emerging soldier flies. Phoebes are charming.

The Dessert Architect

I did the photography for a book called the Dessert Architect, by Robert Wemischner, and according to Amazon, it's available for preorder, though not yet released. We finished shooting the photos about a year and a half ago, and I'm looking forward to seeing the book soon. Finally. I hope.
The food stylist who used matter-manipulating sorcery to make our subject matter camera-ready is Andy Sheen-Turner. We did, indeed, get to taste the desserts before, after and during shooting, and they were all, without exception, supremely delicious.

2009 L.A. Marathon

Hats off, dude.

COOL TOOLS

If you didn't arrive here from Cool Tools, have you been there yet? In addition to heading back to the classroom to pursue some longstanding educational goals, I'm editing Cool Tools now. (Still doing the photo thing, too, of course. Always the photo thing.) And I'm pretty excited about that because I've been reading the site for the past two years, and many of the purchases I've made during that time have come from Cool Tools suggestions. Please visit, subscribe, submit. Just one more link.
See you there.
Thank you.

Old Time Stuff

The Old Time Social of the previous post got me thinking about old stuff, and how old isn't necessarily good—we can thank modernity for Twitter, right?—but it often is. This little decaf bottle has been holding a small collection of 1922 silver dollars and 1964 half dollars since before I was around. Shoot, since before "caffein" had an "E" at the end. It had been my father's, and has been mine for a long while. I check the eBay values of these coins from time to time, but mostly just out of curiousity.

Third Time Ever Old Time Social, Los Angeles

Square dancing, cake walking, fiddling, banjoing, calling, promenading, swinging, BBQ eating and general family friendly good time having—once again at the Old Time Social, under the Spring Street bridge at Farmlab. I wish it happened more than once a year. Here's the Kid, doing a better job of it than I did.

Squirrel Gardeners

I'm not sure where the Picfair Village squirrels are getting raw peanuts in the shell, but as I've been planting our summer vegetables, I've been digging up lots of peanuts. Yesterday morning when I went out to the garden I noticed this new seedling. Digging carefully to the root, I realized it's a peanut plant. So, we're growing peanuts now.

Blogs Don't Update Themselves

The Kid at the new Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook. Well worth a visit. Driving up the hill, we saw the largest snake I've ever seen not in a cage or around a person's neck.

Santa Ana Winds

To have an association/feeling/opinion/superstition regarding the Santa Ana winds is to be a Southern Californian.

Wondering

if a party is vegetarian friendly? Check the decor.

And Finally

One more exterior view of the same project (see below).

Music Building Interior Abstraction

Osborn Architects

Music Building

This is a music building, designed by Osborn Architects, on a high school campus in L.A. County. My high school looked, and felt, like a prison, and I don't know whether or not there was a separate music building, but there were exceedingly long ugly hallways throughout. The acoustics in this building here are amazing, and though the photos won't relay that, I'll post some interior shots here soon.

Flats

After I stopped cursing my third flat in the past week—and I've barely been riding—I realized it had been awhile since my last bicycle-themed blog post. So, here's what it looked like when I found the microscopic hole in my tube. For those of you who haven't shared in this fun experience, you remove the tube from the tire, reinflate the tube, and then submerge it in water. The bubbles help you locate the hole, which you patch with a stinky toxic glue and, well, a patch.

A Lot of Windows to Wash

On these Century City landmarks. Speaking of CC landmarks, check this.