up and/or out

Today is a travel day.  I'll be in Chicago well in time for dinner with friends at Topolobampo.  Hooray!  So while I am in the air and out of contact, let me share a couple of shots from earlier in the week. 

Two instances where things were poking up or out that caught my eye.  I think the plants are California buckwheat, but I am too lazy to double check.  The balloons are assuredly balloons, however.  That window?  It's an opening on the side of a parkade.  Make of that what you will.  They were there the next morning, I should add.

I'll have updates from Chicago - lots of good meals with friends planned, and Conrad will be joining me - as well as from Michigan (and perhaps even Wisconsin) in the next week or so ahead.  Stay tuned! 

weekend update

It's a long weekend, so it's a little premature to do a weekend update.  On the other hand, it's a quiet, easy Sunday, so let me chime in here before I go do something utterly unproductive....

Friday!  I didn't get photos from most of the evening, but it was a nice one.  Our friend Richard was doing some work in Pasadena, so he came by late afternoon, had a cocktail with Conrad, then Van joined us in time to head to Maestro for dinner at the bar.  After dinner and Richard and Van had gone home, I sipped a bit more wine and read before bed. 

I love that it's getting to be cozy sweater weather!

Saturday morning I headed out on foot, past where the Rose Parade stands are going up at the corner of Orange Grove and Colorado,

past the Ambassador Auditorium. 

I eventually met up with Conrad, who has been dealing with a foot injury, and we had a short remaining walk together.  Then, as you might guess, we ended up at Amara for a satisfying breakfast and lattes.

Saturday afternoon I was in the kitchen pretty much all day.  I made a brown butter blueberry tart

and put together a spinach and caramelized onion

lasagna for dinner at Van's last night.  I also roasted some chunks of delicata squash for a salad of burrata, the squash, and some autumn fruits. 

And I put focaccia dough together.  Busy afternoon.  We enjoyed an aperitivo together - martinis for me and Conrad

- and then Jennifer and Sanders came over to Van's for dinner (along with their dog, Daisy),

and the lasagna made for a satisfying meal.

But boy, was I pooped by the time dinner was done and they had gone home!

I was out the door by 6:30 this morning, having already caught the sunrise from the deck. 

Another lovely morning, another nice walk. 

Just shy of 3.5 miles for me, and I took some photos as I went along.  Random things that caught my eye,

nothing in particular.  Buildings,

plants. 

The guys (and Olive) eventually got up after I got back, and Van made us all breakfast (thank you, Van!).

And now it's back at the condo, most of the afternoon stretching before us with little we need to do.  Natasha will come for dinner, and the leftovers from yesterday will make a fine enough meal.  A day off tomorrow, and an easy day at that.

Happy weekend, friends!

the landscaper at work

So here's the deal:  Conrad and I are indifferent at best when it comes to potted plants.  And that is being very very generous.  For years we've had some succulents in pots, and we willfully ignored them.  Occasion watering, pruning once, never transplanting or replacing.  The plants were out there, and that was about it.

But honestly?  We wanted better.  And hey, there's Van, who tends to all the plants on his large patio and knows his stuff.  Apparently I bring cooking, Conrad brings engineering, and Van brings green thumbery to the relationship.  So we gave him a budget and let him do his thing.

Last week he cleared out every pot but one.  Today he got the pots (and more) filled and rearranged.

Friends, it looks good.  It's so different, and while we kept one succulent, it was good to have some other things, including flowers.

Van, thank you.  We have a party coming up this weekend, so it will be great for people to see the new greenery and admire it.

so what have I (we) been up to this week?

It's not all catching up on The Bachelor and American Idol these days, you know.  There's been some real stuff done.

I've mentioned previously that we sold the condo.  That sale closed last Thursday, the new owners took possession last Friday.  And prior to that, Conrad and Van had gone up to close up the condo, get rid of the things we no longer needed/wanted, and oversee the pick-up of things to be shipped to the United States.  On Tuesday, those things arrived.

No, there isn't a lot.  We didn't need the Vancouver furniture, nor did we want the expense of transporting it across the border to us to have to deal with.  We gave it all away (save for a few things we sold to the new owners).  But we did want a fine carpet that we'd had for a number of years.  And we did want all the artwork that we had on the walls before the staging of the condo.  And we did want the Russel Wright ware that I had been collecting and we had been using.  And lo!  Those things arrived with us on Tuesday afternoon.

I'd taken Tuesday off work to be available for the delivery, and then I unpacked the Russel Wright.  Happily, it all made it just fine (which wasn't the case for every piece the guys had packed back with them in their suitcases).  All of it now has a home on the shelving in the dining room, and I think it looks pretty good there. 

Over time, I may add a bit more.  We shall see.

The artwork still sits in the living room.  When Conrad gets home tomorrow, we'll shift it around, and I think it will make for an interesting weekend project if we swap out some of what we have and move it to storage, making room for the pieces from Vancouver that we haven't been able to enjoy for a handful of years.  The carpet will go for a cleaning, a badly needed cleaning.  And then I have plans for it to be unfurled and used in the bedroom.

Ah, but that's not all that happened on Tuesday.  I can only claim to have helped a small bit with the other big project underway.  Van came over to work on our potted plants.  And by work on them, I mean get rid of most of them.  It was badly needed.  Here's the truth:  Conrad and I are indifferent plant parents, and we have never properly cared for the collection of succulents that were getting more and more unruly (and probably potbound) over the years.  We've badly wanted to do something about it, and Van came to the rescue.  You see, he takes care of all the pots and planters on his deck, planning and changing things out as needed.  So there he was on Tuesday afternoon, ridding us of the fire stick that was once so nice and now was ragged.  And the jades that had become spindly.  And more.  He left one pot untouched. 

Once the several lawn trash bags were carted away, we had a barren-looking front and back to the condo.

We trust in him, though, and what he's thinking for sprucing the place up in the days ahead.

Busy times, then, and getting some things accomplished, which always feels good.  And that, friends, is in part what has been going on this past week.

The Lost Years: 2015 (Cape Town)

I went over a decade without updating this blog, and I missed out on a lot of meals, a lot of travel, a lot more.  I was thinking about that recently.  It would be nice, perhaps, to have some sort of blather about some events from the past, perhaps for you few readers, perhaps for the sake of edification somehow.  And when I thought about where to start digging back in, I didn't at all consider chronological order or significance.  No, what came to mind was how nice it would be to revisit the South Africa trip from 2015.

In August 2015 I made a long trek with multiple stops to Cape Town to attend the IFLA World Congress being held there.  I'd never been to an IFLA conference before then, and I haven't been back.  At the time I thought it might be an interesting professional opportunity, and it was in its way, but it wasn't a library world I needed to be part of again no matter what city they might go to.

Still, I thought that Cape Town would be a pretty cool place to go to a conference.  And, of course, I added on some vacation time so as to make the most of the long trip.  Even better, a few days after I got there, Conrad arrived.  So while I had some time at the conference without him, I had most of my time in the country (and most of that in Cape Town) with Conrad.

I liked Cape Town.  It's a beautiful city, and its setting is a large part of that.  I'd seen Table Mountain in photos before, but photos don't do it justice.  Heading into the city from the airport, the driver pointed out zebras on the mountain slopes.  The first couple of days in Cape Town were grey and rainy,

and the mountain was kind of socked in,

but we got some great views of it after that. 

I thought it was especially cool when you could see clouds pouring over it, an effect that the locals apparently know as The Tablecloth. 

Clever!  And by the end of the trip, we had taken the tram up to the top

(with me keeping myself as calm as possible since I do not care of gondolas or trams like that and the heights that we end up swinging above)

for the chance to roam a little, admire the scenery below,

the wildlife up there (those are dassies),

and the flora,

much of which is endemic to the mountain and only the mountain.  So fantastic.

Cape Town is a city, and in some ways, just a mundane city. 

The conference center was not too far from our hotel, and I would walk to and from each day, in among plenty of people going to and from that business district for work.  Those parts of the city felt much like what we would know here in North America.  There were historic parts as well, and we visited them a little. 

We saw some fine neighbourhoods whilst on a bus tour, and we saw all the razor wire atop fences and walls around expensive homes.  Was the city unsafe, we asked at the hotel.  No, they told us, but the levels of income inequality and poverty meant that there was a homelessness problem, and panhandlers were far more likely to accost a pedestrian than a mugger.

To be honest, we stayed within a very small area, the V&A Waterfront. 

Dining, shops, hotels, tourist attractions.  It was a vibrant, lovely place, and I liked our hotel a lot. 

The aquarium was down that way,

the Springboks (rugby) experience was just uphill. 

Heck, even the gay bar

that I went to one night for a drag dinner/show with other LGBTQ+ librarians was pretty close. 

We dined well all around us (though I decided not to post food photos from the trip, at least not in this entry).  Leading along the oceanfront away from where we stayed was a long boardwalk that took me past a stadium

and then onto other neighbourhoods that seemed very nice. 

I was still running at the time, and I took advantage of that to get some miles under my feet early in the mornings there.

I know Cape Town has had some problems since our visit, specifically with water shortages.  If I went back, I would see it differently, and doubtless some of what I liked so much last time is changed or gone.  But I would go back, happily.  It was a marvelous city to visit.  I may never do IFLA things again (almost certainly not, in fact, but who knows?), but I appreciate that attending that conference gave me the chance to go to South Africa and see that little corner of it for myself.