That’s the lovely sound I heard this morning at 10 minutes past 11 – tires swishing on wet street surfaces.
The rains have started. Finally. On and off, all day long, gentle showers came and went.
Time for the happy dance again!
Category: Petra
Training Camp
Since yesterday all signs point towards the most important event of the season – the first day of rain. Temperatures dropped a bit, the (nearly) eternally blue sky has taken on a grayish hue and we are waiting… waiting…
Not to be caught unawares by this change we decided to accustom ourselves to the sound of splattering water drops – in short, we went into rain training camp and settled down with some coffee at the Shea Terrace at Loyola Marymount University.
Enjoying the sights and sounds of the water sculpture was made twice as sweet by the knowledge that LMU was selected as the 2008 Recycled Water Institutional Customer of the Year by the California WaterReuse Association. Water is “liquid gold” in drought-ridden California; those people at LMU are well aware of it by using sophisticated water-saving techniques and using reclaimed water for all their fountains on campus and for landscape watering.
So we got used again to the sound of falling water. Now the “real” stuff should make it’s first appearance.
Tradition: Yes. Old-Fashioned: No
The plan was – go out, have some Mexican food and then go for a hike in the park. As it sometimes happens with plans, this came to naught because we passed a banner saying “Lithuanian Fair.” How could we resist? We parked the car, paid our entry fee and wandered in. First some food, very yummy. Then we were treated to a speech opening the fair. The speech was not too lengthy, which was good, because it was given in Lithuanian. After some songs by two choirs a folk dance group took the stage.
That was some spirited dancing! Such a pretty sight, these lovely young women (later joined by some equally good looking young men) in their colorful traditional costumes, showing off their skills.
Anyway, we still wanted to do our hike, so we checked out the stalls at the fair after the dance performance at a pretty fast clip before leaving. It struck us as slightly strange that at each and every stall we were first addressed in Lithuanian and only upon signaling that we were not able to understand did the very friendly stall operators switch to English. Upon arriving back home my curiosity got the better of me and I checked out “Lithuanians in Los Angeles” on the Internet. It turned out that by pure chance we had stumbled upon the largest Lithuanian fair outside of Lithuania. With only 10.000 people of Lithuanian descent living in Los Angeles, of which only 2.000 still speak their native language, for 60 years this fair has been the annual highlight of this smallish community.
So they do keep up their traditions. They also try to keep up their language with a school of their own which operates on Saturdays. But – they also live completely in the here and now, as is amply demonstrated by this photo from the sidelines:
Culinary Heaven
Last week we had to go down to Santa Monica to the Broad Theater. With triple digit temperatures outside we did not look forward to the ride, but decided to go anyway and early to have some dinner before the event. We parked the car at the theater and wandered off in search for food and found Warszawa on 1414 Lincoln Boulevard.
Nice, we thought, not L.A. at all.
That was not all; on reading the menu I started swooning. Cold Borscht! Just what one needed on a sweltering hot day.
But the surprises did not end there – they had Steak Tartar! Steak… Tartar…
It was incredible, goodness on a plate, paired with chopped onions, mushrooms and pickles. I’m afraid I bored William to death with my stories about this dish, where I had eaten it all over Europe and how much I had missed it. That, by the way, was the funniest side-effect of discovering this restaurant – it awakened a culinary homesickness in me I did not know I had.
The others dishes were good too – a perfect broth with little lamb ravioli (what a delicate taste) and Gnocci afterwards. But the Steak Tartar… I am drooling while writing this.
After a perfectly divine meal, finished off with some Espresso, we toddled back to the Broad for an equally heavenly lecture on Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.
Food for body and mind – what a delightful evening.
The Golden (Cat) Rule
“If it is not a cat toy, it is a cat bed.”
Thanks, Karen, for reminding me.
Big Fun In Pershing Square
Impressions from “Autumn Light LA 2009”. Artists and the city worked together and created a night filled with light, magic and music.
We've Come A Long Way, Baby
That was fun.
But maybe I’ll hang on to the food processor for a little while longer.
Fire II – Going Home
Even though we are locals, we had underestimated how far the fire had come to some of the places we love to go hiking in. So it was a bit of a shock to be confronted with a closed park and this sign at the entrance road to the park.
As we could not drive up to the trail head, we stood there on the road beside our car for a while, looking up at the charred hills.
As we learned later, firefighters had started a tactical fire in the Deukmejian Wilderness to protect adjacent residential areas and some structures in the park. This measure was a success, but the park itself suffered severe damage. A lot of animals, amongst them deer and coyotes, fled the fire and came down into the residential areas – and suddenly we saw some of those on their trek “back home.”
These three deer just wandered out from a garden onto the street. They stopped about 10 yards away and eyed us. Then the largest one of the three ventured forth, up the hillside.
The other two stood very quietly, waited a while and then tentatively started to follow their mate.
The only reason imaginable that the deer did not bolt when they saw us must have been that they were exhausted and in a certain way shell shocked. First the race from the fire, then living in a residential area for a few days – they were ready to go back home, no matter what.
They climbed the hill and disappeared out of sight. But where to? We could see quite clearly that the top of the hill was fenced off with a chain link fence. So we, too, crept up the hill, much more slowly and not as graceful as the deer and we found them.
Two of them were resting in the shade, the third one must have gone further to check out how matters stood.
The final amazing discovery was the way they must have managed to get past the fence (with barbed wire on top):
They surely slipped back in underneath the fence. Try doing that with antlers on your head!
But as we all know – there is no place like home and you do what you have to do to get there.
A Moment Of Beauty In Times Of Fire
Serenity.
Devastation
I took this photo of the La Canada Flintridge fire yesterday from 40 m (64 km) away.
Since then the fire has increased to an area of over 35,000 acres (142 square km). Over 10,000 homes are threatened, some power lines are down, a number of communities are being evacuated.
The high heat does not help; temperatures have fallen from over 100 F, but the weather forecast predicts temperatures still in the high to middle 90s range for the next few days. More than 1,800 firefighters are up there, battling the flames, ten helicopters and eight air tankers are dropping water on the blaze, a DC-10 is unloading fire retardants in certain threatened areas.
Everyone is hoping for lower temperatures, more humidity and that the winds stay down. We all are following the reports and updates with knots in our stomachs.