Month: April 2016

A Little Housekeeping

Travel
Waiting_select_177
Terrenea Health Club, Palos Verdes. April 2014

With the last three posts, starting with Hillside, we have entered the second gallery of photos, December 29, 2013 through the end of 2014. During that year, even though we struggled with the aftermath of Jake’s passing, I continued the Project. It took on new meaning as a sort of homage to him as he was the inspiration for it in the first place, so I carried on. Fewer doctor’s offices, more discovery of waiting spaces everywhere else.

It seems logical to break the pictures into galleries of years. Don’t know why, it just does. I haven’t posted all the photos from the first gallery, you can visit the Photographs page if you want to see more. Likewise, I won’t be posting every picture in the library, it would take more than a year of posting every day to include them all. If there are any photos that you particularly like or strike a chord with you, please leave a comment.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden

Culture
Waiting_select_171c
Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix. March 2014

In March we went to Phoenix to visit my cousin T. She was having some health challenges so we went to help her and lend some moral support. We usually stay with a friend of my mothers who lives there, a short drive from cousin’s home, so we had a little respite from the hectic day to day. T and her children and mom are some of the closest family I have and we make the 6 hour drive a couple of times a year. They come to LA roughly the same frequency to visit other family, so we get to see them every few months. Our visits are always a marathon of shopping, cooking and eating whether in Phoenix or Los Angeles.

On this trip, our friend, a wonderful sculptor in her own right, had passes to the Desert Botanical Garden to see the Chihuly IMG_5499exhibit. Dale Chihuly is an American glass sculptor and dozens of his intricate organic looking sculptures were installed amongst the desert plants. They looked like exotic plants themselves and the contrast of the brightly colored works amidst the muted greens and browns of the desert plants was striking. The wildflowers were blooming, (with the aid of judicious irrigation), the birds were chirping, and the whole effect was magical. Luckily for us, there weren’t crowds of people, so we didn’t have to wait in the lines of the photo above, nor did we have to fight the masses once inside.

We spent a restful afternoon escaping for a moment the harsh reality of our new lives without Jake, thinking the entire time how much he would have loved it.