Blog
Addicted to Dots
As research for an app he is developing, my husband showed me a game he downloaded on the iPad called Dots. While his interest was purely academic, for me it was like taking a first hit on a crack pipe. The game seems innocent enough, child’s play, really. You connect dots of the same color […]
Orange Crush
A profligate impulse buy for some women is a pair of Jimmy Choos. Me, I walk into a farmer’s market to pick up a few veggies and come home with a pomegranate tree. Small children and dogs know that late June is the absolute worst time to plant anything in LA, what with four months […]
Earnest Owl
Although he stands at attention in all his finery, Earnest Owl serves no earthly function other than to make you smile. He so desparately wants to help. You can see it in his eyes, which seem to say “Please, tell me I’m good.” Owls are irresitable. We humans seem to project all our emotions onto […]
The Art of War
“All warfare is based on deception.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War Nowhere is this more true than in the recently aired PBS documentary, The Ghost Army, a fascinating revelation of how the United States army used weapons of mass deception to help defeat the Germans in key battles of World War II. A […]
A Tale of Two Caterpillars
This is a tale of two caterpillars: the Gulf Fritillary and the Tomato Hornworm. The former, I invited into my garden; the latter is an unwanted guest. To my eyes, both are beautiful, but I revere creepy crawly things more than most people. The Gulf Fritillary grows up to be a beautiful orange butterfly; the […]
Got Paint?
The challenge I posed myself in This is Not a Tree was to create a work of art that was durable and eco-friendly. The papier-mâché process gets you half-way there. To date, the fly in the ointment has been the paint and the final finish, both of which are, well, “not green”. While you can purchase […]
This is not a Tree
In Cradle to Cradle, Michael Braungart and William McDonough ask people to rethink the way things are made. Rather than recycling things designed for single use like plastic bottles and newspapers, which is detrimental to the environment (downcycling), he suggests that we manufacture items from ingredients designed to be reused multiple times without harming the […]
Vanity on Display at Los Angeles Valley College
Ever challenging her students, Carol Bishop instructed us to depict the concept of entropy. As background, I read an utterly confounding treatise by the artist Rudolph Arnheim called Entropy and Art: an Essay on Disorder and Order. After that, a scientific explanation of entropy and the expansion of the universe by my husband left me […]
The Jungle Book leaps off the page
From the moment I could read, I lost myself in books. Exotic worlds opened up to me from between countless pages. It was my escape, my joy, my education. Many years later, I am making the transition from print to digital. While I embrace this brave new world, it is not without a sense of […]
Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Free Pups!
We’re not talking Chihuahuas; we’re talking Agave Tequiliana (aka Blue Agave) pups. This handsome Mexican native anchors my Los Angeles garden and produces prodigious numbers of offspring with no help from birds or bees or me. The pups are the genetically identical baby plants that spring up from the base of the parent. While the plant can […]