Strange Pulse

OK, so it’s not Christmas, but close enough! Holy cow!

Do you know what this stuff is?

A friend just gave me all this darkroom equipment. I mentioned to her once seeing an enlarger at the flea market, ‘cuz I knew she was into photography, I was kind of hoping I could talk her into letting me gather equipment and set it up in her house. Turns out, she already has everything! And I mean everything! That’s a COLOR enlarger!

She was talking about setting it up for us to use in her basement, but then she started having health problems. She called the other day to see if I just wanted to take it all off her hands, because she needed space in her house for her kids to have separate rooms. Like I’d turn that down! I’m gonna try to clear a bunch of stuff out of my bedroom and somehow get it set up. YAY!

Oh, and I went to the second Low show last night. Nathaniel ended up wanting to go, and I’m so happy we did. They did a different set list with some songs I really wanted to hear—including “Amazing Grace” and “When I Go Deaf.”

This is what my daughter said to me as we were walking up to the Troubadour last night for the Low show.

I told her, “Your dad says I AM weird.”

Things my husband has said to me lately:

You are so weird.

You are so funny. (But he meant weird.)

You are so strange.

Hey, just because a person likes both Christopher Cross AND doom metal does not mean she’s weird. And just because a person has to drag her 16 year old daughter to a show because she can’t find anyone else to go with her doesn’t mean she’s strange.

Just a little autistc.

The show was fantastic. I haven’t seen Low in awhile and I’d somehow managed to forget how incredible they are live. I was blown away all over again.

They’re playing again tonight. I’m really tempted to go.

I posted a review over at Kulturblog.com. Here are some pics I didn’t use over there:

So one night last week Cat came out of her bedroom complaining that some blankets she’d put on her floor were soaking wet. I went to investigate and found her carpet was all wet, too. Didn’t take me long to realize her wall shares a wall with the kitchen sink. We had a plumbing leak!

I didn’t tell the apartment manager until the next morning. The maintenance guy investigated and eventually it was determined we’d need all new cabinets in the kitchen and Cat’s room would need new carpeting.

At first, the manager was talking about recarpeting our entire apartment, which would’ve been cool, but incredibly hard for us to move everything out of the way. So we said just do Cat’s room. Which kinda sucked, since her carpet was probably in better shape than the entire rest of the apartment.

I spent an entire day cleaning out Cat’s room, organizing her junk into storage bins, something we should’ve done years ago but I never had time/energy for. (Something the boys’ room needs even worse, which I do have on my radar, but as yet haven’t gotten to.) Then we both spent an evening and a morning moving stuff out of her room. And later…back IN.

Daniel and the boys tackled emptying out our kitchen cupboards, thankfully. Because in the middle of all this, I got sick.

Cat was complaining to me—how come the bad stuff always has to happen to us? Whine, whine, etc. But all I could say to her was, “Hey! No complaints! I GET A NEW KITCHEN!”

And she gets a newly organized, clean room, mostly done by ME.

Our kitchen always drove me insane. The cupboards were really old, and painted over so many times, they never shut properly. My kids got used to them not shutting properly—you really had to jam them shut, and keep them the shut, which no one ever bothered to do. So our cupboards were always open, even if it was just a little bit. It drove me insane. I’ve been known to demonstrate my irritation in a rather passive-agressive way, by opening all the cupboards in the entire kitchen as wide as possible, as well as all the drawers, and leaving it that way for someone to find. I called it our Sixth Sense kitchen.

Well, now I have new cabinets. And not just new cabinets—they also recently gave us a new kitchen floor and stove, and now we also have a new dishwasher! YAY!

Our old dishwasher could barely be called that. It was more like a dishsprinkler.

I tried talking the maintenance crew into extending the cabinets all along one wall, but they just laughed at me. “Yeah, and we’ll give you an island, too!” But our kitchen is really small, and we don’t have enough space to store all the food we go through in a week. It ends up being stacked on the counters, and it’s not like we have a lot of counter space to begin with.

Now to refill the cabinets. They’re a little bit smaller than the old ones. Argh.

This is my entire kitchen.

It rained last weekend. First rain of the year…well, I don’t remember if it rained in Jan/Feb/spring, but it definitely hasn’t rained in months and months. So around here, big clouds in the sky = great light and interesting skies for shooting pictures.

I tried to go out in the afternoon, but wasn’t feeling well, and ended up wandering aimlessly around the flea market rather than going to a beach town to take pictures. It started raining and everyone closed up early. You don’t want to get wet in California rain—there’s so much dirt in the air, it coats you with this black stuff. I found this out the hard way the first time I experienced rain down here.

So I was pretty depressed most of the day, thinking I was missing out on a great day for taking photos—and a rare one (clouds!)—but then I suggested to Daniel that we go to Seal Beach for the sunset. He was up for it.

Seal Beach is my favorite beach town I’ve seen so far. Newport Beach is cool, but it’s too crowded, can be hard to find parking. Seal Beach is more remote, secluded, and just down the street from us—really close. And there’s *always* parking.

I had to laugh, because it was cold and wet on the pier, no one was out—except for photographers. They were all over the place. Almost everyone I saw had a camera.

I had just passed a guy with a big rig, looked like a pro setup, when I took this:

I snapped it because of the reflection in the puddle, but it came out rather dark. My brother made a really great comment about it on my Flickr page, though:

fantastic reflection in that puddle. like a piece of magic everyone has chosen to ignore.

What a great description.

Daniel and I were marvelling over how clear it was. You could see everything—mountains. Long Beach! Usually the Long Beach skyline is very hazy from Seal Beach, but not this evening:

This is the opposite side of the pier—looking south:

That guy you see in front of the lifeguard tower? Photographer.

These guys, too:

On the way back to the car I had to snap this pic of something someone had left on the pier:

Just made me laugh.

So after taking some pictures of Morro Bay, I went back into San Luis Obispo to check out the Mission there and the town.

The Mission was basically just a church and a small museum, there wasn’t any old adobe structures like there are at the other missions I went to.

It was nice, but I didn’t really take many pictures. Here are the bells, which are reproductions (but very old ones):

There’s a lovely grape arbor, packed full of purple grapes, which really took me back—the house we lived in when I was a teen had a grape arbor:

I love San Luis, it’s such a great little town.

They were having a street art fair, they closed off a couple blocks and people were drawing chalk art right on the street. It was pretty cool.

I was a little disappointed with the subject matter of most of the art. I’m guessing it doesn’t rain much there, and this could stick around for quite awhile. So you’re going to draw a hypnotized blue bulldog?

But it was fun.

So the other weekend, Daniel’s sister flew down, and we drove to San Luis Obispo for a conference she was attending. While she was busy, I went out and about, taking pictures. I only had a few hours, but managed to see some nice spots.

First I went to Morro Bay, famous for a big rock called, of all things, Morro Rock.

Morro Bay is a nice serene spot. There’s actually a golf course right on it. A nice trail runs right down along the shore.

There was a pro photographer there shooting birds, so I didn’t walk around too much or hang out very long—he was hiding behind bushes and trees to try to get his shots, with a gigantic lens, probably as big as his arm. I didn’t want to disturb the birds he was trying to shoot.

So I headed over to the marina, which is a tiny little dock with a handful of boats on it. Again, a pretty, serene spot.

I took my Holga along, too:

I’ll post some pictures of San Luis Obispo later. I really love that area, I could totally see myself living there. We actually considered trying to move there once, years ago, but I don’t remember exactly when.

Who’d have thought?

Taken in a Walmart parking lot early one morning.

I thought when I moved down here I’d be overwhelmed with the great Mexican food everywhere, but to be honest, most of our local spots aren’t that great. I finally found a place that is super, super good—but it’s not local. It’s up near Magic Mountain, in a little old town called Newhall.

Here’s a picture, taken with my Holga:

Sooo yummy. You know when you see their list of meats and it includes “brains” that it’s gonna be a great place to eat.

This one was trippy:

I don’t know much about art, particularly Catholic art, but I noticed the image of Mary standing on angels or cherubs was a common theme in the paintings at the San Fernando Mission. This was the only one I caught that had demons or devils below the angels, though.

It’s interesting to me how they’re all very animal-like, with different types of animal traits. One has a big long tail, like a snake. One looks canine, another dragon-ish.

Here’s one of a priest surrounded by folks in very reverent attitudes:

The light’s glaring off of it so it’s hard to see. Cat told me the priests shaved their heads like that originally because they had head lice.

Across the doorway from the painting above is this gory painting:

Unfortunately, in this photo, you can’t really make out the blood spattering everywhere.

I get so sick of the ads everywhere in southern Cali. I used to sometimes purposely take a slightly longer route home from work because it meant driving on a freeway that wasn’t covered in billboards. (But I only did it on days it would be likely to save me time. Sometimes the longer route is the faster one.)

I thought I’d gotten used to it. I don’t notice the billboards anymore. I don’t notice the 10-story banners on the sides of big buildings. I don’t notice the ads on benches; the planes flying overhead tugging banners at the beach. But it was kind of hard to miss this, on the parking spaces at my closest grocery store:

Parking for Desperate Housewives.