Amount of money I have spent on pomegranates this season (beg. October 1st): $24 At $1 a piece or thereabouts, that evens out to nearly a pomegranate a day for the last month. Some things you just don’t want any self-awareness about. But I have a fruit problem.

Just a quickie to let all the people I forced to read my dramatic whiny recounts of the California wildfires know that NOT A SINGLE PERSON I know on the mountain ended up losing a home. Not out of my family, my extended family, or my immediate friends. No one was hurt, every pet was Read more >>

Is there anything a good cuppa tea can’t cure? Well, the Outkast helps a little bit too. Seriously though – all my tea-snobbery from being the wannabe tea-sommelier for the new cafe doesn’t change the fact that Twinings’ Lady Grey tea makes my all time favourite cup. It is so lovely and light and soothing, Read more >>

We’re going to a bonfire tonight, where I will gorge on chocolate and whiskey, not necessarily in that order. I painted a watercolor calaca holding a bottle of tequila in an agave field, standing in front of the burning mountains in California. And some other cute skull faces leering happily at the cigarettes and dates Read more >>

I spent the afternoon painting watercolor cards for my day of the dead table. Then I made tissue paper flowers and little chains of tissue paper skulls to decorate with. I have four black candles and a Virgen of Guadalupe candle to add to it tomorrow, and it shall be complete. I am pretty pleased Read more >>

I have to do about five minutes’ work for the café today, and boy am I procrastinating. I even went grocery shopping to avoid it. I’m trying to avoid sugar, dairy, and gluten/wheat products so that I can test for a wheat allergy, but all that leaves me with very little palatable stuff to eat, Read more >>

I talked to my mother this morning. Apparently she fell and broke her rib the night they were evacuating Running Springs. She still owns the house in Valley of Enchantment (Crestline) in a little subdivision called Cedarpines Park. This is the house I lived in before I left home. “They’ve lost twenty nine houses.” “I Read more >>

Today I exercised for an hour. Then I started writing. I went through all of my false starts for Minotte to see if I could glean any good stuff to help me begin. I’m having trouble with that – the start. I have bits and pieces written, but I need to sit down and just Read more >>

I just watched Lilo and Stitch for the first time ever. Yeah. I probably shouldn’t watch any more movies set in Hawaii where sisters are being threatened with seperation. I cried the entire last forty minutes of the movie. And I can’t stand really good animal animation – every time Stitch’s ears dropped I started Read more >>

“Firefighters, including 25 strike teams and 125 engines, tried to make a stand at Crestline in the San Bernardino National Forest, according to U.S. Forest Service fire information officer Stanton Florea. But hours later, Florea said homes there were burning as well.” This is a town of 6,000 people. I hate being this far away.