So excited! The cure for homesickness is..

Source: pixdaus.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

......a short trip to a small town!

I've been ridiculously homesick for the mountains and people I love in Pennsylvania
  [ the ghosts are dancing my name .. ]

Source: thephoblographer.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

   (east coast friends: photographer Sander-Martijn & model Elizabeth Starship; from the Phoblographer  ) 

 I may finally have a chance to see my New Years' Eve nephew Keegan for the first time, help my parents paint their entire living room white, walk by Wangum Waterfall

Source: neagle.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

and swim in a lake where fishes kiss your toes as you float by!   Those excited-to-be-kissed tarsals are crossed with my carpals, hoping for humidity and outrageous thunderstorms!  

Source: zazzle.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

   If I do indeed get a chance to be home I'm going to prioritize visiting my dreamed-of Mildred's Lane in Beach Lake in eastern PA.  J Morgan Pruett's project is swoon worthy in so very many ways, mixing up ideals art and historical preservation into the most amazing layer cake!  So excited I haven't slept yet, so I'll just sneak in a few images of Mildred's Lane and snuggle down..

The "lightning tree" treehouse..

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Camp tent..

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.


converted chicken coop..

Source: jmorganpuett.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

 even her icebox amazes me!

Source: jmorganpuett.com via Deirdre on Pinterest

You can take the girl out of the country..

but she'll still build a country on her bloomin' balcony!

I've decided to make a concerted effort to write here more frequently--the last post I managed to bum MYSELF out, so I thought I'd share some sunny pics of my mini container garden to cheer myself--and imaginary readers--up!
Here are some photos of my little walkway outside my apartment at the meeting point of Hollywood, K-town and Silver Lake.

If we're making up imaginary areas, I'm in East Hollywood, in the Bicycle District, a couple of blocks away from Hel-Mel, where  Scoops,  ,, The Bicycle Kitchen, & Against the Stream (a meditation center run by the Darma Punx), can be found.  If you don't live in LA, that was probably incomprehensible jibberish. The great part is, if you understood me, it was COMPREHENSIBLE jibberish! Teehee! 

Our balcony viewed from below

 and as you walk up..

This succulent on your left is our blooming aeonium -- had it for 3 or 4 years, this is the first time these strange beautiful flowers have appeared!

On your right, a plant stand from the 50's I ganked off of the street when I lived in echo park.. Top to bottom they're strawberry plants, 

a struggling jade, 3 different tomato plants (in the blue planter),  LemonadePetunias & a random fern.

Many of these were presents from friends, rooted from neighbors or found discarded by plant stores..so I don't always know the names of my creatures!

 This pile o plants are Mike's latest acquisitions--future honeydew melons-- with those stinkin' attention-seeking lemonade petunias sneaking into the shot! A couple of hours after I took this the top melon plant burst these tiny little fingernail sized yellow blossoms.  As for below, *makes grand sweeping gestures a la cheesy tour guides* 

    On your left you'll find our jade plant, which I scavenged as a tiny blown-off branch from my neighbor after a spring storm..

On your right a potato vine plant with pretty star shaped flowers, an ornamental purple pepper plant rooted from a Trader Joe's bouquet (!!),

..and my beloved 1960's bicycle, the best birthday present a girl's ever gotten.   I love my guy! We've both got brownish green thumbs because we're pretty forgetful--together we've got 2 green thumbs! 

You can't see it from the picture, but both this mini eggplant and pattypan squash plant have such lovely blossoms that I'll be content with no vegis! It's mid-July, should I give up hope?

Last but not least, hugging the corner we've got random succulents, a lovely star jasmine and 2 huge San Pedro cacti that were gifts from a friend who moved back to Detroit.  Each summer one of the cacti gets these HUGE night blooming flowers..

  Thus ends the two foot balcony garden tour.

Pigeon Poop, cockroaches: The downsides of living in a warm large city.

I always thought it was strange that in Santa Monica, they wash not just the streets, but the sidewalks as well. In a city where the desert hits the ocean, I've always thought it's questionable water waste. Of course, it's California, and they've already thought of that! Apparently they wash the streets to prevent pollutants from reaching the ocean? Still, I just can't shake the root feeling that there's something ostentatious, frivolous about the idea of washing sidewalks.


However, as I walked under an overpass today from the Bicycle District (aka Hel-Mel) to my boy , I noticed a 2 inch layer of pigeon poop lying where the concrete walls meet the sidewalk. I realized how many cockroaches I've seen sauntering the streets in LA, and how few in Santa Monica, and suddenly sidewalk power washers make much more sense.

No matter how clean you are, you can't guarantee your neighbor, or even neighborhood out here, and once the heat hits, so do the shiny skittering critters. *SHUDDER* I try to be tough, but nothing turns me into a girly banshee faster than seeing one of them!


I'm not alone in this--my mom cites this as one of the major reasons we left New Orleans when I was 5. I'd never seen one in real life until moving out here. . and someday, it may be a factor for me leaving LA too!


On the plus side, unlike NY, rats are few and far between out here.

NYC health warnings
http://birdcontrolblog.com/?tag=bird-deterrents

I've been slowly getting sicker for at least 6 months, maybe longer. As of January it appears that I'm allergic to gluten, which is found in wheat and barley, which encompases an annoying lot of unexpected things: pre-shredded cheese, beer, soy sauce, curry & taco spices.. The summary: gluten attacked my lower intestine, which then became unable to absorb fat soluble vitamins. So bread (etc)created malnutrition!

Fast forward to February, halfway through the month. Unwittingly I mention the strange bulge that has begun to go down, hitherto assumed to be a 'popped' rib leftover from the walking pneumonia LA gave me on my first Southern California spring.. I can hear the intake of breath, and the rolling eyes over the phone as my doctor demands to know how I'm feeling otherwise. I admit I'm now sleeping MORE, up to 15-20 hours a day. . I'm told that it's not a rib, it's a very swollen spleen, and that what is wrong with me can't be fixed over the phone.

I may have bad bacteria, I may be aneamic, I may have a thyroid playing swinger. No way to know over the phone, the law was laid down--I need blood tests. Without $, without insurance, who will pay? How will pay? No idea, but the 'free' clinic has a 30 DAY wait unless you have MediCal, which has a line around the block implying the same.

I'm a certified doctor, you know.. I went to google medical school.

I tend to not go to the doctor for what are big things, having a huge fear of being a hypochondriac. . . and then it turns out I have had cat scratch fever for almost 2 months, have had walking pneumonia for 6 months... have been working at a coffeeshop with 2 fractured carpals..

So I check google... I shouldn't have, but I did, and made myself predictably crazy. These stomach problems with gluten intolerance untreated can lead to the same cancers my uncle, my grandfather, his sister and brother died from (rare leukemias, pancreatic and colon) ...my swollen spleen can indicate a parasite, or celiac-gone-wild, and all can indicate problems with ovaries, which runs in my family matriliniarly... I did mention I made myself predictably crazy, yes?

So I find myself taking a revoltingly long water-wasting hothothot shower, as I do when I'm stressed (or chop vegis that didn't need the torture, hiding them in a soup). And I fantasize about cancer, what would I do, how would I cope? And I realize I would propose to my lover, ask to elope and secretly civilly marry. I realize I do not want to die without his hand holding mine. I, green-eyed dance-a-holic who has been homeless, has lived through a blizzard in a trailer with no heat, who has lost friends and lovers to needles and madness, I realize I can lose everyTHING in my life, but I'm no longer willing to go down without fighting for someone. For him. I'm in love quietly, and cancer has no chance, imaginary or real. I really hope it's just gluten. Until I figure out what it is, I'll be good--to me, for us-- and if good isn't good enough, well, I'll figure it out, one gasp above water, well-treaded, at a time.

As much as I truly love cupcakes, I love my man more, and finally, myself as well.

Venting my spleen

I've been suffering from strange health issues....

I had a bout of what I assumed to be salmonella last summer, the week of two of my best friends' marriage in PA. Mr. Pink ate some bad meat, got sick, and I, whilst nursing him to health, fell ill as well. He recovered in 3 days, I took 3 weeks.. and got better, and got ill again, never to recover.

This continued off and on until finally, in January, I called a doctor in PA. Awkwardly I explained my strange bowel problems, my migraine for nearly 2 weeks straight, and was exausted enough to feel that I'd gotten mono again, which of course is against the odds, although being an oddling I may beat them. 

Among other things, one was clear: I suffer from malnutrition, probably due to malabsorbtion of fats.  There was an assumptive hope that this was caused by my body's rebellion to an allergy.  So.. a diet was proposed, stringent and severe, especially for me, as a vegetarian. No dairy--goat sheep or cow--no soy, no wheat/gluten. I agreed, not realizing the week after was my birthday..dismal day indeed.   My tongue was unhappy, but my belly was getting better... and migraines were skipping a day (yup, that makes 3 weeks of off and on migraines). Turned out, dairy isn't the problem. Wheat/gluten it seems, may be. For a vegetarian, that limits many foods eaten outside of 's own kitchen...

Spent my morning looking for illegal fireworks in Chinatown

Being unsuccessful, I then returned home to hollow out a mannequin head, which will, I presume, end up with a dry ice or hydrochloric acid explosion.. I can't remember if the head'll be the abominable snowman or the girl he's chasing..it'll be bloody delightful

New year's resolution:

Rekindle my funambulismic dance twixt feral and faerie. For some strange reason I spent the past year trying to figure out norms, mores, normals and morals...in rounding my edges I dulled my own firewater..back to the wardian case to examine the oddities of my soul under new growing conditions!