During and after the rain

We made cookies and ate them for both breakfast and lunch. We watched True Grit, and I was taken by surprise given all the gun-shooting, western stuff. Can we talk about this movie? I know I'm late to the game, but was that the most incredible and incredibly weird and wonderful stilted and formal writing and speech you've ever heard in a movie? I loved it. Jeff Bridges? I love him. That girl? I loved her. Matt Damon? I loved him and his silly Texas ways. Iris Dement singing at the end? I loved it. That last shot? Gorgeous.

Saturday

It began to rain in the early hours last night, and I woke abruptly at the drip, drip, drip from the metal awning over the steps that lie at my back door. I sat up, completely awake, got out of bed and grabbed the flashlight that I keep by the side of my bed in case there's an earthquake. I put on my clogs and opened the door, walked outside through the drips and to the timer for the sprinkler system. I shut it off, thinking about possums, whether they stay away when it's raining and where they stay if they do. I also thought about the water saved and the money saved by my vigilance in turning it off and then rolled my eyes at myself for thinking these thoughts at four am. When I went inside, I forgot to dash through the drip and was soaked so I pulled off my pajama top and put on another and got back into bed wondering how it was possible to wake so suddenly and think about so many trivial things. It sort of scared me and sort of disgusted me, too. So much for remembering convoluted dreams or feeling hazy and sexy and stretching contentedly. I wonder whether all the stress and thinking works to dull down the subconscious. I think of the days when I waited tables, and my nights were filled with weird and wonderful dreams of minutia -- tables filled with red wine glasses, only a tiny bit in each one, all needing to be cleared in that instant, fish that coiled up off of plates and into customers' laps, endless back and forths with undercooked steaks, yapping mouths and tiny plastic ketchup containers. Now when I wake it's wondering whether they'll play lacrosse in the rain (yes) and how much, exactly, is saved when the sprinklers don't come on.

It doesn't get much weirder

than a rainy morning in late June in Los Angeles.

driving north, Hollywood Hills under rain

Kumquat tree

Rainy Sunday

I've been sitting in bed nearly all morning, drinking coffee and ignoring my children by only uttering yeahs and neat when they ask me something or show me something. I'm reading Keith Richards' Life and Susan Casey's The Wave and if there are two subjects completely opposite to my life right now as I live it they might be rock and roll as practiced by the Stones and surfing big waves as practiced by Laird Hamilton and native Hawaiians. Life, though, makes me think of my first husband and all the records we listened to, first in our rented farmhouse on the outskirts of Chapel Hill and then the rented pentecostal church in east Nashville where we lived once we were married. How so much time and life can have gone by is weird --

This is what the rest of the family is up to --

Spanish homework

the creation of a Football Shrine -- I didn't ask for details

Valentine, wishing that someone would pay attention

iPad  book