you can finally identify some of the usual suspects
The quote of the day:
"I think Mulder is the worst FBI agent in the world. He spends millions of dollars investigating these paranormal phenomena and never comes up with any evidence. He's the Kenneth Starr of the FBI."
Running news:
Slept in today.
The X-Files is on the cover of Entertainment Weekly again. Slow news week, guys? Inside this week's issue are all the letters referring to the last X-Files cover, which was only 3 weeks ago.
Enough already. I don't care; I'm beginning to hate The X-Files.
Give me something else. Show Antonio Banderas (or hell: Anthony Hopkins) as Zorro. Do a cover on George Clooney. Hey, have you done a story on Dylan McDermott and The Practice? Enough with Nose Boy and Snarky Woman.
Yesterday, Harry invited Darin and me over for a BBQ lunch.
Harry cooks up lunch
We thought this was the big 4th of July celebration a day early, but this turned out not to be the case. For example, Brent came alone, without Therese and Ellie.
Brent watches LA Confidential
Mike was not pleased to see me with a camera in hand. I took his picture anyhow.
Mike
I can't remember where Al was for most of lunch--in his room, I think. He came out only after we'd already stuffed ourselves silly with hamburgers and chicken breasts and beans. I forewent beans in favor of peach pie with Breyer's Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream, the best damn vanilla ice cream out there.
Al ignores the camerawoman
After lunch, Brent put on Urotsukidoji, the seminal (pun intended) Japanese tentacle-sex anime movie. The plot of these movies basically revolves around demons raping women in vile, degrading, vicious ways. Brent's seen this movie a couple of times, Darin's seen it twice. While I wasn't physically sickened by the movie (the way, say, Ren and Stimpy or South Park makes me physically ill), I can't imagine wanting to watch it more than once. Or even once all the way through. It's horrible and misogynistic, and I really hope that no one I know finds it in the slightest bit erotic. But I wasn't going to ask, either.
Instead, I went home and immediately fell asleep for 3 to 4 hours. This nap made me groggy for the rest of the evening, and when Darin came home at 1:30am I still hadn't fallen asleep. He complained that he wasn't going to be able to fall asleep and then did so immediately. I lay awake for a while, then after falling asleep woke up every hour or so until 8am.
Our friends Paul and Amy invited us to their garden plot for July 4th to have a picnic. Darin and I stopped at Bristol Farms, a chi-chi supermarket in Pasadena, to get meat and cheese and bread. We bought only one kind of over the 40 available mustards. We stopped at Pavilions to buy a cooler (which has a handle and wheels, making it easy to transport) before heading out to the Palms/Santa Monica border to see Paul and Amy.
I've never heard of these gardening co-ops before, but evidently there are many of them. This co-op has four "phases" (just like a housing development), each phases having perhaps 20-40 plots of land. A plot of land--in the case of this co-op, a 15x15 (that's in feet, not meters) square that has nothing but dirt, and usually very weedy dirt at that--is rented out to gardeners with only a few restrictions: you can't sell what you grow, and you can't grow anything illegal. But you get all the compost you can use and all the water you want for a mere $28 a year, which sounds like a deal to me. And the garden is right across from Santa Monica Airport, not that anyone would see it unless they were looking.
Amy got the plot of land, thinking that she would suffer gardening in order to have a mother-son bonding experience with her 10-year-old, but she's become the avid gardener: her garden is chockful of delightful edibles, including zucchini bigger than your arm.
Amy shows Darin around her garden
Amy's enthusiasm for gardening got me interested in investigating gardening again. Or at least in trying to grow my own veggies. Well, in trying to grow one of these monstrous things that looks like a refugee from a Roger Corman film.
Paul is an old friend of Darin--they go back to the ICOM days in Chicago. Paul doesn't like having his picture taken, but he stayed still long enough for this one:
Paul listens attentively while Darin gets lost in the high weeds
We made sandwiches and had salad made with greens from Amy's garden in the picnic table section. This is definitely a cool place to spend an afternoon:
The view from the garden spot--our new cooler is on the table
Another gardener, one of the ombudsmen for the project, stopped by our table to help herself to a bit of Amy's Japanese cucumber salad and talk to Amy about various goings-on in the gardening community. You know, the usual: theft, deception, a sociopath running around bothering the women, cliques, and so on... (On the way home, Darin opined, "Sounds like the journaling community.")
We spent several hours just sitting in Amy's garden plot (on chairs, not on the zucchini or any other plants) and talking. It was a beautiful day out: sunny, but not hot, with a cool breeze to keep temperatures hovering around 70F. The view to the ocean was a bit overcast, but who cared when you had a panorama of Santa Monica to Marina Del Rey?
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Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com