in just a short time the weather’s gone from “maybe we can own wool clothes in LA” to the usual 80 degrees and sunny. for a hike we went wandering in a lovely canyon in the Palisades (where locked gates aren’t too locked) and saw several thousand feet of wild and rampant nasturtiums. they weren’t flowering (or sporting seeds, which are good for making faux-capers when you pickle them) but we could see the spread going wide and deep into the distance. (and unstoppable, if you’ve ever tried getting rid of nasturtiums.)

our little home renovation project is a budding little weed too. it started as a small concrete job in which some Samoans (drinking cases of Hawaiian Punch) poured us a new set of front steps and removed our old flooding concrete deck (more Punch).
we then had a slowly eroding dirt mound in the shape of a deck, so we went ahead and got a new deck (built by a tea-drinking Brit, who was not impressed by the new steps, saying “you either pour smooth, or you pour rough, you don’t do both,”) a new gate (replacing the old crappy unswinging gate), and decided to seal the garage so that the outside world would no longer visible from the inside.

first things first. the old gate with redwood posts gets reclaimed and sent back to modernism:

then, we had to turn the garage inside out.

(the dog’s in there for scale, and looking at all that old art is sort of fun, though anyone who’s interested in how NOT to store paintings can contact me for lots of info. if anything looks pilfered in the photo-i’m sorry)

next comes the diverting of a stream so we can grow real Japanese wasabi and wild mushrooms (and nasturtiums i suppose) and really call it a day. i wish.