Ok. I MIGHT have lied.

That might not be our yard, per se.
It might be the San Diego Wild Animal Park, if you wanna get all technical about it.

If there was any justice in this world, what I wrote wouldn't be a lie, and my yard would look like that. Except that I would be riding the rhinos. And also, except that I would never own that many souvenir shot glasses. They would be a bitch to dust.

PumperNickel and I had a GREAT day yesterday. After a leisurely breakfast of coffee and breakfast burritos (Luca and I shared an egg and potato, Knickerbockers had egg and ham), Nick and I headed up the back country way to the SDWAP.

I would have a lot more pictures of the WAP, but my camera has developed a most disagreeable habit of only saving the pictures it feels like saving. Usually the ones I'm not as anxious to have. But it might be just as well. The picture recreated below might have used as evidence to ban me from the park.




Nick and I devised a game while we were there. 5 points for touching an animal, 20 for getting it out of the park and back to the car. Percentages of these point amounts were awarded for good efforts. Nick won, 8 to 5.

Another set of pictures my camera decided to send to a gaping black hole were all the pictures taken at the tiger pen. I shall attempt to recreate the scene, but from a better angle than my pictures would have.. I'm leaning over the railing toward the tiger, who is stalking something. My Nick is paying 25 cents a minute into a telescope to stare at a very fat man on another observation deck. I think we lost these pictures because I had to turn my camera off in a hurry, after Nick poked me and said, "Aaaa, he saw me and he's headed this way! We'd better go, quick!"



My favorite part, hands down, was the catfish. I was throwing bits of my $8.00 pretzel to the ducks, and suddenly it looked as though the water was boiling, as the catfish surfaced for their share.



Add to the file of reasons we probably SHOULD have been thrown out, I told kids that if they could touch an animal, they could keep it, and Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be able to say no. Actually, add that to the file on why I probably SHOULD have been bludgeoned with a stroller.

Gawd, I love chaos.

I can't decide which is more amazing. That they didn't make us leave, or that they didn't keep us there as an exhibit.



After we left the WAP, slightly sun-crisped, we stopped at a small museum, the San Pasqual Battlefield State Historic Park. A long name for a small place. It's pretty much just a museum because it's our only battlefield. We were the only car in the parking lot. Inside was a very bored looking policewoman.

"I have a video, if you guys wanna watch it. Just lemme know, ok?"

"Uh, sure. We'd like to watch it."

We sat down in the little theater as she started the film, which was basically the long version of this postcard.



"Psst. Nick. Wanna make out?"

"Dude. She has a GUN."

"Good point. So, no then?"

We stayed as long as we could find ways to look interested. The policewoman looked so starved for company, I keep expecting her to stroke my hair like a doll and ask us to stay. I stalled over the guestbook awhile, making note that the last guest had been a week ago.


We wandered up the trail a ways, and spend a lovely half hour trying to catch lizards on an old red wooden bridge over a dry creek bed. Because that's what warm Sunday afternoons are for and where else would we want to be, anyway? We didn't catch one, but *shrug* we laughed a lot.

After awhile we headed back through the mountains, and while passing through Ramona we decided to stop at a winery. After accidentally crashing a private party at one winery, we ended up at Schwaesdall Winery. There were three other people there, and the owner holding court, so to speak. The cat shown on the homepage there also came around to be sociable. After a sip of so many good wines that it was hard to choose, we did manage to choose two to buy. I was a total girl and went for the white zinfandel. Nick picked a great Cab.

When we got home, I picked the last of the cheesybites off of Sat. night's pizza, and we snuggled in to watch some very stupid tv.
It was a perfect day.

You'd think that for a fun change of pace, the stuff in my head would actually make sense sometimes.

Last night I had a dream that I found a bunch of sheets of paper blowing in the wind, (very a la this) and when I gathered them up and tried to put them in order, I found that they were two very different things.

Most of the pages belonged to a very very bad sci-fi novel. Which I read completely, once I got it in order.

But a few of the pages were some sort of legal document. It was addressed to a car insurance company, from a woman who was promising that her elderly husband would no longer drive her new car, if they would continue to cover her. Apparently there had been an instance which demonstrated that her husband was too old, and that his eyesight had failed to the extent that he should no longer be driving.

What was funny about this, in my dream, was that it had apparently been written with one of those legal document templates, a sort of fill in the blank form, and you could tell this because some of the language didn't match the legal-ese of the rest of it.

"....... waiver of liability should the party of the second part, Edgar Lucente, that old goat, drive the following vehicle, MY new convertible, especially if it's past that hussy from my mall walking group Louise's house, while continuing coverage to ....."

And the dream turned into something about pencils, and My Nick becoming a cigar aficionado.

So. What does it all mean?

Who missed Nick more? Me or Luca?

Tough to say.
Also, who did Nick miss more, me or Luca? In Nick's own words, "I missed you too of course, but you're not a puppy."

At any rate, on Sunday we went up to the last stage of the Tour of California race in Long Beach, to spare ourselves those last agonizing hours of Nick-less-ness.

On a whim, I stopped off to see my Gramie Darlin' and her dog Roxy. Gramie and Roxy are the perfect pair (next to Luca and Nick of course). They're both adorable, tiny, and charmingly ornery.

As we got to LA* it started to rain and the traffic slowed. Partly because it's LA and gridlock is it's natural state, and partly because no one here knows how to drive in the rain, and I passed a total of three accidents before the traffic thinned out.



I amused myself by taking pictures of myself in the rear view mirror with the flash on, so that I look shiny.
See?


And then I amused myself by filming this very boring vlog. No really, it's shaky and toward the end I actually bore myself, but my hair looks good, and I figure there can never be too much public footage of that.



Once we got up there, there aren't many pictures, mostly because I promptly plastered myself to My Nick's side, so close that any pictures I tried to take of him would have come out blurry. But I do have this picture, taken while Nick was taking down the booth, of Luca and I. I was trying to get him to stand up and put his head there behind the cut-out, but he was having none of it. So I tried to stand on my toes and take a shot, while Luca rolls his eyes at me.


After all, he is a teenager.



*I should specify that I have a rather liberal interpretation of the geographical term LA.
Pretty much everything from past San Diego, north to Bakersfield, is LA in my mind.

Meanwhile on the All Luca, all the time channel....

I know he seems a bit hyper here. He'd been inside all day, and other than to pee, he wouldn't go outside, so we had some playtime indoors. Afterwards, he crawled up on the couch and snuggled with me.

That's amore.

When I go to bed early to eat rasberry sorbet and watch old South Park episodes, and I doze off, and my Nick wakes me up because the part in the Christmas episode where the boys go to Canada and Cartman cries because Kyle slapped him is coming up, and he knows how hard that part makes me laugh .......

That's love.

Speaking Of Things I Love .......

Gwyneth Paltrow Singing Bette Davies Eyes

From Duets, one of my favorite Gwynnie movies.

YouTube Video Of The Day

From one of my favorite dumb movies, Amazon Women on the Moon.

My Favorite Comedian

It's Not A Hootenanny, It's A Extravaganza! Full Of Pomp!

My favorite episode of Sealab.

Why Isn't This A Profession Anymore?

I wanna dance around fireplaces at parties and have cool sound effects when I shake my goodies. It's like being a stripper without having to be a stripper.

I found that clip while looking for this clip, which is one of my favorite scenes in ANY movie, EVER.

Pink Panther - Car Chase Watch Video Clip

I've always thought of it as my autobiography in an abstract, one-scene sort of way, with me playing all the parts. It's brilliance, and I could watch it over and over and over and over.
Enjoy!