The Gurly Life

Exploring the city on a bike without getting run over

Have you ever heard of this cool thing called CicLAvia? It just happened, on Sunday, April 15. Not the first one, apparently. They closed off 10 miles of city streets from 10am to 3pm, and only bikers and pedestrains and skaters could use them. It was the most fun I've had in a very long time. I rode mostly on my own, surrounded by several thousands of my closest friends. I of course had my camera, and stopped a bunch of times to take pictures. Exploring LA city streets without all those damn cars is really something else. I was on my bike for almost 4 hours. It's gonna hurt in the morning -- no, it's hurting now, and it's gonna hurt bad in the morning. Totally worth it.

Bikers milling about close to 10am, ready to take the roads. At 10 on the dot, shouts and cheering started us off. I started at the Bicycle District Hub, at Heliotrope and Melrose. It is less than 2 miles south of where I live, and down the hill. So, I got on my bike and rolled on down there.

Riding through a residential neighborhood. Look, no cars! I didn't even know this street was there.

Around a corner, and there's downtown within sight. Did not take long at all, especially since it's downhill almost the entire way from my place to downtown.

The Park Plaza Hotel. Did you know this was here? I didn't! They were shooting something. In retrospect, I should have asked them to let me wonder around for a few minutes.

The pond in the background is MacArthur Park.

View of the 110 freeway from the 7th Street bridge.

Coming to downtown off the 7th Street bridge.

An ironic statue at one of the fancy corporate buildings downtown. The security guards were staring slackjawed at all the bikers, they just ignored me. Usually I get shooed off a property if I'm taking pictures.

Downtown buildings.

Bikers in downtown LA.

A building downtown. I love the fire escapes on these older buildings.

I rode all the way east past Alameda, and through a neighborhood that was all food stalls and pinata shops. Loud music blared, and every food imaginable cooked on outdoor barbeques and cooking surfaces of all kinds.

And then, on Central Avenue, the Coca Cola bottling plant. For real.

Which looks like a ship.

This is a hand-made bicycle. It says "I'm a bad-ass, but I care about the environment." Lots of shiny skulls.

This is bike polo. Polo, on bikes. Yup. What will they think of next?

Railroad tracks and the LA river from one of the bridges.

Since the way back was shaping up to be one long uphill ride, and since I needed to get back to go swimsuit shopping (yeah, I know!), I decided to take the subway back. I had run into a couple of people from my meetup group, and one of them very gallantly escorted me safely back to Union Station.

A sunset photo jaunt at the Santa Monica Pier

After many months, I finally was able to go on a Light Chasers meetup again. On Saturday evening, they had a meetup set up for the Santa Monica Pier for a sunset shoot. We have had some weather this weekend (i.e., clouds) so it looked promising. It was a last minute thing, I planned to take my camera downtown at sunset, but at the last minute I noticed the meetup, and that there was 1 spot left, so off I went to Santa Monica. This week I felt drained every evening, too tired to do much of anything, so I really needed something restorative. I took a few photos (well, a lot, but most of them were garbage). The complete set is here on Flickr, but here are some favorites. The set has a few more variations on some of these, different light, different framing.

This is probably my favorite favorite. It's definitely the most interesting sunset shot I've ever taken. I just love this photo.

In this one I like the space, and the brightness of the lights.

I took this one while we were waiting to get started. The great thing about taking pictures is that you could stand in one spot for several hours, just pivoting and waiting for the light to change, and have something to photograph.

What I love about this is that the eye goes straight to that flag. Also, I have been practicing more vertical landscape shots. It's a completely different world when you look at it vertically.

What's a sunset beach shot without a sailboat and a seagull? Here I love the different layers in the hills in the background.

This was 28mm/f22 with a 0.3 second exposure. However, I used a variable neutral density filter here to reduce the amount of light coming into the lens so I could get the slight blurring on the surf. I can't remember how many stops I lowered the light, I think it was about 6. I probably could have just gone up to f40 on the camera directly, but the filter is new and I wanted to experiment.

This was also 0.3 seconds, I took a bunch of pictures of this life guard as he was cleaning up. Most of them were just blurry, but this one I got him almost still, and the water with that smooth slow-shutter speed effect. Fun!

The Santa Monica Pier.

This is not the most interesting picture of the moon, but I got so excited by the fact that the details of the moon in shadow are visible that I had to include it.

Hanging out with Michelle

The bestest part of my weekend on the central coast, of course, was hanging out with Michelle.

Michelle and I have been friends for 16 years, since back in the day when we both had aspirations in the entertainment industry. I was working at the time at a below-the-line talent agency, and Michelle had just moved to the US from England to be married to her first husband. She was living in the OC, but was interning with us. Back then, I was one of those LA people who packed extra water, camping supplies and flares in my car whenever I had to cross the Orange Curtain. I'm only slightly kidding.

There are a lot of things I like about Michelle, such as her brains, her determination, her talent, her loyalty and her integrity, just to name a few, but there are some things about her that stand out for me. For one thing, Michelle finds humor is just about any situation - I mean, life is serious enough as it is, right?

I admire her greatly for setting up her photography business. Not just for doing it, because anyone can pick up a camera and "be a photographer." But not everyone does it right - Michelle is constantly working on her craft, learning, and challenging herself.

Michelle is a strong, opinionated person who can and does consider other people's perspectives and in some cases changes her mind and even her ways.That takes real intelligence. So anyway, you get the idea. We're friends, she's awesome, and you wish you were her. She's also beautiful.

Yes, this is the gorgeous Michelle. And before you go all googly about what a great picture I took, I will tell you that it's only because I follow directions. We were walking along a cute little creek near the Mission in San Luis Obispo and Michelle marched out into the fabulous light with the fall colors behind, turned and said, "Take a picture of me here." So I did. I may have mentioned a few times that Michelle is a photographer. You can see her photos on her website, Memories by Michelle, and I recommend you do. If you click on the Blog tab, you can see her posts about this trip, with photos.

Michelle always takes great pictures of me, so I tried to take some decent ones of her.

I really like this one, too, you can see the sultry side of her. She is likely to point out the imperfections in her face, but I think her face is perfect just the way it is.

Michelle has the travel bug. Pretty soon, she will be traipsing around the world taking photographs, husband Joss and daughter Daisy in tow. Daisy is the cutest, smartest little girl, and boy is she high energy. The thing that cracks me up the most about her is that she will run in circles around and around and around for much longer than anyone thinks possible. I don't know about you, but I don't remember having so much energy, even as a kid, that I had to just run and run and run and run. I did wonder where the circles came from, and this weekend I got my answer. This happened on the beach while we were standing around waiting for the light to go down.

Michelle and I make a good team. We inspire each other with our cameras, and the really awesome thing about traveling with a photographer is that she doesn't get annoyed when I take 20 minutes to get a shot. Usually I can't take photographs and be social at the same time, but with Michelle the two things are one. Bliss! We like to play on the internet, so more than once we found ourselves sitting together in the living room with our feet up in nap socks, laptops on our lap, editing photos and Facebooking, and tagging each other in our FB posts. Bliss!

Out photo trips were slow meanders punctuated by breathers, cups of tea, lemonades, and chats. Bliss!

Here we're chilling out at Hearst Castle, Neptune's Pool. It was chilly but the sun was lovely and warm and the little couches were too tempting.

I took a few more pics of Michelle, which you can see here. Mayhap you will prefer different photos of her than the ones I chose.

We stayed in Cambria, in a rental two bedroom cottage, only a hop skip and a jump from Harmony, Pop. 18. Brilliant idea. Very restful. Here's our little cottage, though I didn't take many photos of it. If you go to Michelle's blog post, Day One, you can see some lovely photos of it inside and out.

Here's our quiet little street, followed by some berries and some trees. Just because.

One evening we went into downtown Cambria and Michelle did a wine tasting for me so I could pick up some wine for a friend who had asked. What a trooper she is! During the wine tasting I believe I got hit on by a firefighter from Ventura - at last, you might think, what she's always wanted! Only, well, said firefighter was a woman. Close, but no cigar.

At the wine tasting we also chatted with a woman who said she teaches at a university training terrorists, and I thought, mmh, that seems unlikely. As it turns out, she trains therapists. Glad I asked before I ran out and called the FBI and caused everyone (me) a lot of embarrassment. No one wants to be put on the FBI's Most Annoying list (less notorious that their Most Wanted list, but it's the kiss of death if you're trying to be even a tiny bit cool, which is of course one of my goals in life).

Next up: Hearst Castle. Stay tuned for tedious tales of port-a-potties and imaginary bugs on my lens.

NOT white elephant gifts (see previous post)

On the other hand, sometimes gifts that at first glance might appear ripe for white elephant regifting end up giving people (me and my mom) hours of entertainment. To wit:

Once again, Willow strikes again! What's kinda sad about this is that we're almost enjoying it more than the fancy new tv. Almost. It does have a huge advantage over the new tv: it is portable, and can be shown off at inappropriate moments at work and at play.

This is what hair looks like

Recently, Ivy the Monkey Goddess got a very cute new haircut. She waiting several months to get her cute new haircut because she wanted to grow it out enough to be able to donate it.

This is what hair looks like just before it is donated.

And this is what Ivy looks like with her cute new haircut.

Austin, TX!

I will begin by saying that Austin, TX, is awesome. It's like if Cali and Texas had a love child, and they named that love child Austin. I did not take a bunch of pictures, unfortunately, I was too busy watching football games and marathons as it turns out, but it's hilly and tree-y, and even large developments have some architectural variation, unlike, say, Las Vegas or Orange County (no offense, OC, but you gotta admit: your architecture is boring). It struck me as a young, vibrant city with lots of strong communities. Very cool.

Here we are downtown, near Lake Austin (I'm not clear on whether it's a lake or a river). See where all that dirt is? Normally, it's covered in grass. But as you probably have heard, Texas is suffering a severe drought, so now all that's left is dust.

View of same river from a bridge.

View of the river from the roof of a high rise apartment building.

I went to visit my friend Krista and her family. Here, we are cruising with the top down while it's about 90F out. She is concentrating on driving, thankfully. The weekend was still quite hot, in the 100's, which was a bit of a shock to me.

It was a whirlwind weekend. People with children never stop moving -- it's not at all like having cats! We began with Friday Night Lights. Apparently, Texas takes its high school football quite seriously, Austin included. And it's not just the games, which can draw out huge crowds (GIANT bleechers, completely packed), but it seems like half the high school is involved. If they're not playing, they're in the marching band, which had to be about 60 people, or the dancers or the cheerleaders. The half-time show rivals any Super Bowl, sans wardrobe malfunctions (is she ever going to live that down?). It's all about the peagentry -- who knew?

The next day we caught the kids' flag football game

You can't tell, but it's about 104F here. There is a thriving industry in shade structures, coolers, portable chairs, and the like. Shade structure makers must literally be rolling in Texan dough after this summer - and deservedly so.

Everyone is very polite in Texas. I am told that this is because everyone is armed. Not being either for or against guns, really, I find this a compelling argument for being armed. It's a bit like the nuclear arms thing, maybe - no one wants to press the red button, otherwise we all go kaboom. Or something like that.

On Sunday Krista and her sister Natasha ran a relay marathon, in 1000F degree heat. I flopped around in the shade, drank water, and generally wilted. If I were at all concerned about impressing anyone, this would have been somewhat embarrassing, but since I'm not...

Natasha, post-run, and Krista, ready to go.

And here comes Krista, after 6 miles in the baking heat, and with a cold and cough. Some people are unstoppable! Go Krista!

Here are a few more pics.

The state capitol. Did you realize Austin is the capital of Texas? I had no idea, I kinda cottoned on when I saw the Capitol, and I find it highly ironic that a bastion of liberalism is the capital of TEXAS! Pretty, fantastic, if you ask me. I took this photo as we drove by. By the time we drove past it, it was so hot that I wasn't willing to do much more than roll down the window.

You kinda wanna stay here, dontcha? Well, so does everyone else. See the NO VACANCY sign? That's right. This street, by the way, has weird fish-bone parking. You don't pull in and park, you back into the spot (the "scales" point up the street, rather than down), so then you find yourself with your nose already in the street, and all you have to do is pull out into traffic. They cleverly call this "back-in angle parking," though it could easily be called "ass backwards parking," and it not be an insult.

This is in downtown Austin, South of Congress. Lots of cute little stores and cafes, and this food truck lot. This street is where I bought cowboy boots. I've been contemplating cowboy boots for a long time, approximately 19 years, so being in Texas I thought this might be a good time to get some. We went into a store called Allen's Boots, where a nice man with long hair and the craziest Texas twang you ever heard sold me a pair of tan leather boots. Goat hide. At first I thought he was putting me on with that accent, but there were several people in there with the same accent, including customers, which leads me to conclude that they actually speak that way. If the whole thing was a set-up to get me to buy boots, it really wasn't necessary, but I do appreciate it, it's a sexy twang. The boots are extremely comfortable and I wear them all the time now. Don't judge me. When you have hip issues, you take any comfortable shoe you find, and you wear the shit out of it.

Scott and Jordan play chess in the shade while we wait for the runners. Scott was one of the runners, too, and ran the last leg of the relay.

And what would a trip anywhere be without a couple of fire hydrants?

A good time was had by all, and I really liked Austin. Thanks so much for having me, Krista, I really enjoyed the city and loved seeing your family and getting to know your boys a little better.

Everyone should have an office buddy

My office buddy is Krista.

An office buddy is someone you are friends with and with whom you work closely on a bunch of stuff. At least, that's how I'm defining the office buddy for purposes of this post.

The thing about having an office buddy is that you can talk to them about stuff and they help you be smarter. That's what Krista does for me. She helps me refine my legal arguments, and makes me ever more sophisticated.

I remarked to her that if suddenly I were to find myself without her, my entire house-of-cards legal skill set would fall down and I would be revealed for the mediocre lawyer that I actually am. She is not just smarter than I am, but also has more experience - which means that it's not likely that I am as useful to her as she is to me, but one day I will be.

I should have one of those stickers on my car that says "When I grow up I want to be a Krista."

Concerning a photo of mine

I forgot to tell you this: last week, I got an email from someone who wanted to use one of my photos. Specifically this photo:

This is a photo of Kealia Pond, on Maui. When I was there, they were just finishing up a lovely walkway for visitors (this was a couple of years ago). I think it might still have been closed, but I walked out there anyway and took some shots. There was no one around, it was peaceful and lovely. You can see more Maui pictures on my Maui set on Flickr, if you're so inclined.

The Kealia Pond National Wildlife Visitor Center is being created, a non-profit educational dealio, and my photo will be displayed on a panel with other photos. How cool is that? Now I *have to* go back to Maui to check it out. Then I'll take a photo of my photo. Tee hee.

Hot monkey love!

Ok, not really, but I thought I'd get you to look at this post if I gave it a steamy, titillating title.

Ivy the Monkey Goddess and I have new shirts. I'll let the pictures tell a thousand words. Or just these words:

Mom and I take the national parks (after paying the entrance fee, of course, who do you take us for?)

Mom and I remembered to take some pictures of each other as well as pictures of the scenery. Here are a few.

Saturday morning, waiting for breakfast poolside with my Kindle.

Just some little ol' trees along the road. The tiny person with the red cap is my mom.

Between two trees.



My mom standing inside the footprint of two giant sequoias that grew so close together they became one tree at the base. They're called Ed by Ned (more pics later).

Mom in front of General Sherman, the largest living tree in the world. It is 3200 hundred years old. My mom's big thing was that she was afraid of bears. They have brown bears at these parks, which are generally not aggressive, unless they get used to eating people food and/or unless they have cubs. Instead, she got stung by a bee. It was a fuzzy, beautiful bee, so we felt kinda bad for it, poor thing.

I have made it to the top of Moro Rock, in Sequoia. 380 steps at over 6000' in altitude (about 2000m +). It makes you a little winded but it's doable. But if you are afraid of heights, I don't recommend it, there are sheer drops on both sides of the Rock.

Mom at the Kings Canyon Visitors Center.

By the river at the bottom of the Canyon.