Last weekend Linda and I attended a wake, for a kitty cat.

This might sound somewhat out of the ordinary but it wasn't the first funeral that we've been to for a creature with more than two legs. Over the past few years we've held more than a couple of memorial services for bunny rabbits that managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up, literally, on or near our property. We have a bunny burial ground a couple of blocks from our house. It's on a hillside and has a nice view of the sun setting behind the mountains.

During the drive to Ventura for the wake Linda and I were discussing how many people just don't get how devastating it is when you lose a pet. Sometimes you'll hear them say something like, "It's not like it was a person." Paaaaaleez. There are a number of persons that I could do without.

I told her, again, about how I lost a kitty named "Saturn," (don't ask) back in 1979. That puddy loved me like no thing or no one before or since ever has and the feeling was mutual. I still haven't gotten over her 30 years later. Then there was "Spike." A big, fat, orange tabby that lived with me for about 9 years before a coyote got him back around 1990. I still think of him. He loved broccoli.

Jean Claude, the kitty whose wake we attended, left this world last week and took with him the broken heart of our dear friend Alexis who had the privilege of watching over him during his stay on Earth. He lived nearly 19 years. He was jet black and very lovable.

Claude was known for many things but one of his characteristic traits was his bullwhip of a tail. You needed to be wary when walking past him or he might cut your legs clean off at the knees. He could wake you from a dead sleep slapping that tail on the floor and he would flog you with it when you pet his back sometimes leaving welts that hurt but healed soon enough.

Claude loved the sun and just hanging in the garden. He liked salmon and stretching out across in the bed.

He also enjoyed a good Cuban cigar and a single malt scotch while sitting poolside with the New York Times. He liked the music of Cat Power and was a fan of Pink Panther movies.

All this past week I've been watching the moon. The moon is my planet and I like watching its mood change from month to month and year to year. But for the past 10 days or so the moon has been particularly beautiful.

Last week I rushed home so I could try to get a photograph of the moon juxtaposed with Venus. They were so close they seemed to be holding hands as they dipped below the horizon in the west.

Watching them through the viewfinder in the darkening sky I could have sworn I saw the silhouettes of Saturn and Spikey chasing each other around the moon and Venus. I often see them, up there, dancing with the stars, but this time there was a third kitty silhouette, his tail whipping up little clouds of stardust.

I can hold a camera pretty still.
And for that matter, a Glock, an AK or a over-full martini.
After years of practice and coming back to a darkroom -- I'm dating myself here -- with what you hoped was going to be an Pulitzer image, only to discover later while looking at negatives through an Agfa loupe, that there was just too much camera shake in that photo of the firefighter carrying the infant out of the still blazing building while trying to breathe life back into her lungs, to be useable.
Well, maybe that never happened but you get the idea.
I've missed enough shots in my day to learn how to hold a camera still, in low light, heh, in no light.
Heck, with a wide angle lens, I can hand hold down to 1/2 second and longer. Of course that's given I've got some way to prop my elbows against my body or a light pole or a Toyota or I have a public information officer to lean against.
If there's enough light to provide any detail at all, I can get a sharp enough image out of it as long as the subject is still. If the subject is moving around, nothing I can do about that.
Case in point, above.
Sometimes I like to smear colors around.
Mostly, I like things to be sharp, when I want them to be.
Kitties don't like to hold still, especially when they're trying to inhale Friskie's salmon dinner while you have a fisheye lens shoved up their nose.

Funny, I never used to like green.
I don't know how this could have happened. I like to think that I'm in tune with the Earth. And although the atmosphere of our planet is something like 75% nitrogen, which is basically blue, some people just equate green with Earth.
Some even refer to it as a green planet.
Planetary tourists and other first time visitors to Earth would be overwhelmed by it's blueness on approach. This is particularly true of immigrants coming here from places that are dominated by hues in other positions on the color wheel.
For example, Martians would get a chill down their spine, provided thay had a spine, when getting their first glimpse of the brisk tones rushing up toward them as they approached Earth's stratosphere.
Mars' atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.
Nasty stuff. Think about the view from the Sepulveda Pass looking toward the westside on a hot summer day -- in 1969.
Co2 makes for a not-so-lovely rusty melancholy.
And as Elton John once said, 'Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.'
It's clearly not alone in this category but green, is an earth tone.
Nothing is green on Mars.
But there is lots of green on Earth.
Chlorophyll for one.
I once owned a key lime martini green van but that's another story.
I have at least 3-4 different tones of green shirts hanging in my closet. I don't own a single green T-shirt, even though I prefer to wear T-shirts over ones with collars.
I love nearly every kind of green food, although I don't consume nearly enough of it.
I've been trying to convince Linda for years that she should color at least some of her hair green.
But when I became a photographer and a designer, I avoided green.
This is not to say that I preferred primary colors in my photographs or typography or whatever.
I always loved Earth tones.
They are my colors.
But I would never use green. Green just seemed icky to me.
Cold and forbidding green, I thought, was just unfriendly.
When Linda came along I learned that her favorite color, the color that she looks best in, the color of the majority of her clothes, food and the color that always seems to show in designs she's done, is green.
Soon, I began to see the light.
With a wavelength roughly 520-570 nanometres it sits, big as shit, smack in the middle of the visible color spectrum, I should have noticed it before!
I started experimenting with it. Just some nice, safe dark, grass greens at first moving on to more kelly greens and eventually finding appreciation for the likes of ... sea foam.
I know, it's crazy.
Now I use it almost every day. I put it in my photos, typography and meals.
I'm calmed by it now and I couldn't be happier.
I like an olive color mixed with a burnt orange.
I also like olives but not burnt oranges.
I have Linda to thank for turning me on to green.

Recently, the Daily News' Kevin Modesti wrote a piece called "Nine Things to Look Forward to in 2009." You can read that along with a goofy, collage thing that I made to go with it at the bottom of this page.

Kevin is just a damn fine writer and I am no match for his pithy (the most overused word of 2008) wit, but it did make me think about some stuff. So, I'll try to put that stuff into some 2009 kind of context.

Disclaimer: The following may well be somewhat less-than-Modesti-optimistic and you might rather go here.

Here's more than nine things I think:

POLITICS
George Bush and maybe more importantly, Dick Cheney will be gone. Need I say more? If that is not something to look forward to in 2009 than I will shoot myself in the face with a shotgun.
We get a bright, young, charismatic (the second most overused word of 2008) visionary in the White House. The always clairvoyant Joe Biden may have predicted that, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy," but my guess is that he will not authorize an invasion of Cuba (or Iran or North Korea or Venezuela, or Pakistan or Pacoima.)
 George Bush and maybe more importantly, Dick Cheney will be gone -- sorry, I just love the sound of that.

ECONOMY

• I keep reading that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Has anybody else heard this?

FOREIGN POLICY

• The war in Iraq has so far cost a staggering $585,457,262,785.  That's about $341.4 million per day or $1,721 per person. Raise your hand if you can think of a better way to spend a half trillion dollars.  Why don't we just:

• Get out of Iraq and take $100 million dollars per day and pump it into the economies of countries that hate us.

• Take another $100 million dollars per day and subsidize farmers in Columbia and Afghanistan so it would be more lucrative to grow coffee and fruit crops than coca and poppies.

• Take another $100 million dollars per day and pump it into health care and education in places like, oh, I dunno, Pittsburgh and Pacoima.

• Take the last $41.4 million dollars per day and put it into research and development of renewable energy sources.

• Maybe we could skim a teeny amount off to try to save the newspaper industry.

If we did all of the above, I doubt we would be in any worse shape than we are now economically, socially or politically.

ENTERTAINMENT

• How is it possible that with all the extraordinary talent in Hollywood that none of the major studios can come up with an original idea? Entertainment Weekly's cover story this week is about the new year's must-see movies which include yet another "Harry Potter," (the sixth) "Wolverine,"  which is a spin-off of the three previous "X-Men" films (which are spun up from comic books) and there are no less than two more in the works, "Terminator," (the fourth) and "Public Enemies," a John Dillinger biopic starring Johnny Depp. Hmmm, that's never been done. Although I enjoy most of these films, love Johnny Depp and Terminator, I'm just sayin.

• In 2009 major Hollywood studio execs should step away from the comic book store and go to the Lammele, maybe see a film made in France or Spain or Ireland or even Romania. What? You can't make $400 million on a film about a street musician and an czech immigrant or  illegal abortion? Maybe a better plan is to make films about a 1960s era cartoon family that lives in the stone age or a modern day version of TV show witch who is married to a mortal advertising executive.

• Don't get me started in the e-v-i-l RIAA. I'll let others speak on that.

SPORTS

• Besides bookies, does anybody really care?

FINALLY
A few things that we should just do:

• Get rid of paper dollars and use dollar coins and get rid of pennies. Anybody ever been to Europe? The single dollar bill, as iconic (overused word alert) as it is, has lost it's charm. Either redesign it (like the prettier $5 bill) or discontinue it. And pennies now cost more to make than a penny. How does that make sense? It's another classic example of Americans showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing for "simpler times."

• When we text or IM each other we should try harder to use decent grammar and punctuation and ... stuff. (This is one of my resolutions.)

• Carry around a few dollar coins in your pocket and give a person living on the street one or two once in a while.

• Stop texting or IMing someone's phone with your phone.

• Live greener (another overused word.)

• With a little creepy emphasis, try to insert the word "ladies" into sentences during normal conversations and business meetings. "I think our site needs a better SEO strategy, laaaaaadies."

• Be a Maverick.

OK, not that one. Not only is that an overused word, but it's dull as dishwater.

Shooo word, shoo.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and back then, I won't give away my age here but it was sometime during the last ice age, we pretty much counted on a white Christmas every year.

It was a time when sea levels were much lower than they are now and there was a land bridge between North America and Asia.

And it snowed in the winter. A lot.

It snowed so much that we never wondered if we would have a white Christmas or not. We rarely wondered if we would have a white Thanksgiving.

We just did.

Most of the times, for some reason, even though there was already snow on the ground on Christmas Eve, the universe would dump another foot or two overnight as if to make sure that six-year-olds, with brand-new sleds, would have plenty of virgin power to test them out in.

Nearly every memory I have of Christmas, as a kid growing up in that great, white north was just extraordinary, bordering on supernatural. I'm sure that's true of most kids growing up in middle class America during the last ice age. But there is something otherworldly about waking up on Christmas morning before the sun, standing in the twinkling light of the Christmas tree, looking out the front door and not being able to see the steps up to the front porch.

There are no streets or curbs or sidewalks. There is only a single, unbroken blanket of fizzy, brilliance as snowflakes the size of silver dollars fall silently and constantly straight down, as if in slow motion.

This morning, Linda and I went out to a local Starbucks for coffee and just outside the door was a young girl, probably about 13-years-old, sitting on what was clearly a brand-new Christmas bicycle and guarding a second one nearby, likely belonging to her older sister.

As I passed her I asked, "Is that a new Christmas bike you have there?"

"Yes!"

Of course it was. Once inside Linda and I talked about how a new bike had to be one of the ultimate Christmas presents a kid could get. I told her that we never got bikes for Christmas because you couldn't use it for another 6 months. You'd just sit in the basement and look at it and dream about summer as an ice storm raged outside.

Standard Christmas gifts for kids growing up in the great, white north during the last ice age were, sleds, toboggans, ice skates and usually some newmittens or boots or a scarf.

The way I remember it, we weren't rich or even as well off as more than half the kids I knew at school, but the economy was pretty good during the last ice age and we all loved Christmas.

One of the things that has stayed with me for all these millennia was the excitement of dragging all the boxes of Christmas lights and decorations down from the attic. Opening up those boxes and taking out all that Christmas stuff meant Christmas was finally and officially here and it always slammed me back to the year before.

I would remember packing all that stuff away the year before like it was yesterday

Then, there was the smell.

The scent of last year's Christmas tree still lingered inside those boxes as if you'd just cut it down and rolled around in the sap.

Inevitably, in the haste to put an end to Christmas and return it to it's tomb, some pine needles or maybe a small bit of a branch still attached to a bulb or an icicle would get packed away. I  loved the smell of the remnants of last year's Christmas tree. It is still one of my favorite memories of Christmas as a kid.

Now, and for the past few years, Linda and I purposely take a piece of our tree from the current year and pack it away with all the ornaments and decorations.

The photo above is of the top of our tree from last year and a small slice of the trunk which we packed away on January 5, 2008 at about 4:45 p.m.

When we took it out of it's storage tub a few weeks ago, it smelled awesome and as always, slammed me back to Christmases during the last ice age.

Yesterday, we took all the Christmas stuff down, packed it all away inside large plastic tubs with red lids on them and and stored those tubs in the rafters out in the garage.

The last thing to go up there was about a 6-inch piece of the Noble fir we had in our house this year. It seems to get bigger every year.

I've said this before but, we don't belong here, not really.

For some reason, I not sure how, we ended up on this street, in this town. A place we sometimes like to call Vanillaville. Sometimes we call it Stepford.

We like to give it those names because really, only white people live here. And they're all the same age and have the same number of kids and the same Lexus SUV with the little, white, silhouette decals of their family and their pets on their rear windshields.

Most of them have McCain/Palin stickers.

And they all seem to have the same kind of unconscious awareness. They robotically careen their Lexus' around the wide avenues at high rates of speed, oblivious to anything around them, desperate to fill a prescription before the soccer game ends.

Some have cell phones which have actually merged cellularly with the subcutaneous tissue just under their scalp and will eventually have to be surgically removed, when their plans expire.

Freud would have a field day here.

We call this place Vanillaville and we call it's residents oblivioids.

But one thing that the oblivioids of Vanillaville do well is Christmas.

The above photo is not the best representation of Vanillaville's holiday zeal, it's just one that I like and was taken directly across the street from my house on what could arguably be called Candy Cane Lane.

Driving around this town during Christmastime it's hard to tell if it's night or day. You don't have to turn on your headlights and you may even reach for your sunglasses on some streets.

There are entire neighborhoods that you know, it's really a competition. It's a competition to see who can drain the power grid in Los Angeles County the fastest. Sometimes neighbors even join forces creating Christmas light block parties by stringing lights across the street from one house to the other, sharing the electric bill and showing up the Jones' down the street.

They put huge Christmas trees at the end of the block complete with lights, ornaments and even presents. You actually have to drive over the extension cords to get around them.

It's all really, quite, beautiful.

People decorate their houses with every imaginable kind of spangle and ornamentation. Most houses have those lights hanging from the rain gutters that are supposed to look like icicles and white, wicker reindeer grazing on the lawn.

But the trend for the past few years in Vanillaville at Christmastime is inflatable snowmen and Santa Clauses.

In addition to icicles and wicker reindeer my neighbor has both inflatable snowmen and an inflatable Santa Claus. One of them, I'm not sure which, actually has a motion detector built into it that plays "White Christmas" sung off key and at a too-slow tempo by what sounds like a wino on his second bottle of Thunderbird, whenever a leaf blows past in the yard.

The singer puts emphasis on the wrong beats so it sounds like, "I'm dREEEEAMMing of a whIIIIIte ChrismAAAASS!"

And as for Linda and I, well we go more for the retro, minimalist look.

We have a single strand of the large, old-style, teardrop shaped lights that accent the roofline of the house.

That's it. All one color. Red.

We love Christmas too but we really don't belong here, not really.

One of the holiday traditions Linda and I have, for one reason or another, developed over the past few years is to go to the Saugus Cafe on Christmas Eve morning for breakfast.

There's nothing particularly festive about the Saugus Cafe. They don't serve Panettone french toast or hot apple cider with cinnamon sticks and I don't think you could get an eggnog there if you begged for it.

What they do serve for breakfast, and not just on Christmas Eve, is bacon and eggs, chicken fried steak and biscuits and gravy. Good, old-fashioned, stick-to-your-arteries comfort food, with heaping helpings of trans fat all smothered in cholesterol.

Yes, they serve breakfast, oh, and beer.

The Saugus Cafe is not without its charm and does have a bit of a storied past. They've been serving hardtack, jerky and hot coffee to cowboys, train robbers and various other drunkards since 1887.

Located along the Southern Pacific Branch line the building itself looks much like a rail dining car.

Inside, strong light spills onto the tables in booths along one side, diffused by picnic-basket-checkered drapes as 18-wheelers and Harleys roar past on San Fernando Rd.

Sipping burnt coffee from one of these booths you can almost feel the rocking of the rails and imagine the stands of live oaks and hilly, California countryside rolling by outside the window.

Last Christmas eve morning, Linda and I sat in one of those booths, contemplating the mayhem the next two days would bring over the last crust of a rye toast.

As we debated our own Christmas menu and exactly which brie goes best with Lebanese fig spread and candied walnuts, I noticed a rather elderly couple in the booth next to us.

Though not their real names I'm going to refer to them as Glenn and Lillian.

Finished with their breakfast, Glenn and Lillian sat quietly for quite some time except for the occasional tink, tink of Lillian's spoon in her teacup.

Lillian was small and smartly dressed with her raincoat buttoned all the way up to her floral, silk scarf. Her pure, white, fresh-from-the-beauty parlor hair was neat and tidy with not one curl out of place and her bright, red lipstick was heavily applied without being smeary. There was a faint scent of Aqua Net.

She kept her hands folded and fingers intertwined as she continuously stared a hole into her teacup.

Glenn was large by any comparison and sat straddling the bench, one leg inside the booth, one out in the walkway. He wore a pair of shoddy, denim, carpenter pants stained by paint and steak sauce. His threadbare work boots were loose and untied, the frayed laces tangled in knots.

A holey, white t-shirt made no effort to conceal his bulbous middle.

Just then, a waitress cleared a few dishes and placed a bottle of Budweiser on the table. Glenn picks up the bottle and takes a long swig from it wincing almost as if in pain as he places it back on the table.

A few minutes pass and he exhales loudly as a way to camouflage a belch.

"Joe's daughter Mary got married last weekend," he spouts loud enough to be heard in St. Louis.

Lillian's response is a speechless and muted, tink ... tink.

A few more silent minutes go by save for a breathy belch or two.

Then Glenn picks up the Budweiser and takes another long swig this time recoiling as if he's just swallowed gasoline as he puts the bottle down.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhh ... heefffffffffffft."

Another minute of silence passes before Glenn asks a question. The question is really more an acknowledgment and a protest.

It's a question to which they both know the answer, but neither know the explanation.

"Where's the time go?"

Tink, tink, tink.

Seemingly, we humans live our lives so that we can have a house. Well, and food.

Isn't that the way it's been since man opted to come down from the trees and stopped dragging his knuckles on the ground?

It is certainly not a new thing that when we are not collecting the best palm fronds for our thatched roofs or installing new, sound-proof, energy efficient, double-pane windows in our craftsman view home, then we're out hunting or gathering or, shopping.

Linda and I have managed to fall into line with the rest of the sheep, baaaaing our way to and from our jobs so that we can have toast for dinner in our own hut in a place called America.

Our hut not the worst one on our street. It's not unattractive and it's comfortable and relatively well-appointed. Yet oddly, although inside our hut we have a large piece of cushy, sectional furniture, a luxurious, leather couch and chair and a queen-sized bed with a goose feather filled comforter, we often spend a fair amount of our free time in the room usually reserved for an automobile.

When this hut was constructed in 1985 the builder added a large room, actually the largest room, just for automobiles.

All the huts on our street have similar auto rooms. Some or our neighbors don't use them for their automobiles. Some use them to stack up cardboard boxes filled with items that they once shopped for but no longer use.

Some of our neighbors stack these boxes to the ceiling and if they could they would stack them all the way out into the street. But if they did that they would not be able to close a door and conceal the fact that they live as pack rats.

The auto room attached to our hut has enough room for two automobiles to live. But we only let one of our two automobiles stay in there.

That's because we have a lot of cardboard boxes filled with things that we once shopped for but no longer use.

But like some other huts on this street we get further utility from our auto room. We have wooden cupboards installed in there that are filled mostly with things that we once shopped for but no longer use. There is also a wooden bench that serves as a place to put various items that may need some work done of them or some sort of repair or possibly a coat of paint.

Around this workbench we have also placed two tables that create a U shaped space that we use for a variety of things.

One of these tables is a drawing table that Linda uses to create illustrations using a variety of media. On the other table is a Mac Mini with a wireless connection to the network inside the hut. We use this machine to surf the innerwebs or listen to net radio when we are "working" out there.

In this space I've also put a drum machine and three electric guitar amps. If I'm going to plug-in and play electric guitar poorly, this is where I go.

In or around this space we've also added a high studio chair and a comfortable but old chair that once occupied the living room in Linda's old apartment.

We like this space in our auto room a lot.

For some reason we seem to like to spend Friday nights out there. We keep the over-sized, auto room door wide open, drink too much Jameson, listen to or play music poorly and yammer into the night.

The folks who live in the huts directly across the street from us likely think we're crazy. Which is fine with us because we actually think they are psycho. They have boxes stacked to the ceiling inside their auto rooms even though they have 4 or 5 cars parked in the driveway and on the street.

Last night, as Linda and I were drinking too much Jameson, talking too loudly and playing guitar poorly in our auto room, it began to rain.

This came as a completely satisfying surprise to us both and since we both worship rain.

Rain worshipping is something that happens to a person who lives in an environment where the sun may shine every single day for 8 or 9 years straight.

We love rain so much that we actually have a plan to eventually move to a different hut in a different place in America called the Pacific Northwest where it is known to rain every single day for 8 or 9 years straight.

We love rain so much that when it does finally come, we get out multiple cameras and start taking pictures of things we look at every day but we never see wet.

Last night, after a few hours of drinking too much Jameson in our auto room, we stood outside in the driveway. We bent ourselves over backward and felt the rain on our faces and our chests and our necks.

Then we came inside to one of the smaller rooms in our hut and crawled up into our queen-sized bed with a goose feather filled comforter.

We drifted off to sleep as the sound of rain poured through leaks in our deteriorating rain gutters and splashed onto our barbecue and deck box and other things that we shopped for and still use, in the backyard behind our hut, in America.

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in my freezer when it became painfully clear that I needed to free up some space.

The time had come when those two, half-used bags of Trader Joe's
chicken breasts covered with freezer burn needed to go. Oh, and the
four bags of equally freezer-burned edamame, two containers of chili
leftover from last Christmas and ... alright, all those yellow boxes.

I've acutally been storing these yellow boxes in at least 3-4
different freezers for years. Some of them from as far back as 1994.
How many people can say they have stuff in their freezer from 1994?

It occurred to me, finally, that I was never going to open up those
yellow boxes and consume the contents of them. Or the two cans that
were stacked in there with them. So I took all those yellow boxes out
of the freezer, along with the two cans that were stacked in there with
them, piled it all up on my workbench out in the garage.

After removing the two bags of frozen chicken breasts, four bags of
edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and all
those yellow boxes from my freezer, I found I had lots more room in
there to store some other items which used to fall out on the floor
whenever I opened the freezer door.

OK, now take a look at the above photograph and raise your hands if you know what it is.

Hmmm, a bunch of boxes with the word Kodak on them. Must be some
kind of camera thing. Maybe it's flash memory or a type of optical
storage disk.

Nope.

If you raised your hand and answered, "film," you get a gold star either for being smart or for being old. 

For those of you who didn't answer film, if you're over 20, you need to take some classes.

Film is a kind of cultural artifact from an era (oh, about 5 years
ago) long since passed. The word "film" is sometimes used to describe
an artform that is considered an important way to inform, educate,
entertain and indoctrinate the societies that make them. This is also
known as moviemaking or just movies.

For our purposes we'll refer to film by it's truest and more
technical definition, that of an ancient medium by which images were
recorded on thin, flexible sheets of plastic or other material coated
with a gooey, light-sensitive emulsion, using cameras through a process
called photography.

Photography [fəˈtägrəfē] Noun. The art or practice of taking and processing photographs.

The process of taking photographs didn't always precipitate the
instant gratification we've grown accustomed to. Long ago, it entailed
expending cash and fossil fuel to purchase film packaged in little
yellow boxes usually made by a company based in Rochester, N.Y. After
recording your photographs you had to expend more fossil fuel to
transport your film to a "photo lab." Up to a week later you then used
more fossil fuel to return to the photo lab, paid more cash to the
clerk, a good amount of which went to a company in based in Rochester,
N.Y., and your processed film was returned to you along with an
envelope usually stuffed with 12, 24 or 36 photographic prints.

Tragically, only about 3% of these photographic prints brought any
satisfaction at all. The rest exhibited blobs of orange or black or
white usually with some ghostly silhouette of human figures you could
almost recognize, proving that photography was not exactly
unchallenging. 

Just a few minutes after I took the above mentioned photograph I was
walking through the aisles at my local Albertson's store in search of a
bag of charcoal briquets which I would use later that night to grill
fresh(er), not freezer-burned, chicken breasts.

On the way to the check-out counter with a 25-pound bag of Kingsford
on my shoulder, I heard an announcement over the in-house public
address system that said if you were a shopper at Albertson's and you
brought your digital photos to the digital photo center located within
the store, you could go home with those digital photos stored on an
optical storage disk commonly referred to as a CD. This announcement
came right between REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling
Anymore" and the Eurythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again."

What is the point of all this?

Maybe I'm grieving over the gradual and torturous death of a beautiful artform.

For many years I used to consume large amounts of film, most of
which came packaged inside little yellow boxes like the ones in the
photo above. On an average day, I probably made 200-300 exposures on
film.

Now, I might make 200-300 digital captures of little yellow boxes of film so that I have one for a blog post.

Ever since I piled all those yellow boxes on my workbench over two
weeks ago, I've been looking at them and trying to decide what I'm
going to do with them. I decided, that I just can not toss them into
the dumpster. That would lead to their being buried in a landfill
somewhere in Los Angeles County. I couldn't bear that so, I took a
photograph of them.

Now I'll probably stuff all of them into a box and continue to store them for many more years to come.

Just not in my freezer.

We live on Tupelo Ridge Drive, in a house we sometimes call 'Rancho de los Gatos.'

Two humans live here but the three felines who allow us to reside with them, collectively rule this place.

But it clearly wasn't always this way, and if the two humans and three
cats who currently call this small piece of property home did not
occupy it, many, many other critters would.

In fact, the critters who live around this place are constantly trying to evict us so they can move back in.

Regardless of what the Los Angeles County Tax Assessor or the County
Recorder or Countrywide Mortgage or Tom Gapen thinks, this piece of
property on Tupelo Ridge Drive belongs to them. The critters of Ranch
de los Gatos want their land back and they're never going to give up,
ever.

They're like little four and more legged insurgents periodically
amassing forces on the border and fearlessly launching raids deep into
enemy territory only to be fought back to positions in the rear where
they tend to their dead and wounded before regrouping and invading
again and again.

Some of them have defiantly never left and they live among us. We can scarcely tell the enemy from the friendlies.

Unlike them though, we don't think of most of the critters who live
nearby as the enemy. We would welcome many of them to take up residence
anytime they like and we even encourage it. Just not inside the house
and unfortunately, that seems to be where most of them seem to want to
be. At least those with more than four legs.

The critters who would most like us to leave include, but are not
limited to, ants, bees, wasps, flies, gnats and countless other bugs
that I can not identify.

And spiders.

I'm not going to say that our house is 'infested' but before I moved in
here I had probably seen maybe a half dozen black widow spiders in my
life. Now, I could find a half dozen in a half hour. Fortunately they
tend to keep to themselves mostly in the garage, the shed, the deck
box, the cactus plants, the bushes and around the recycling bins.

We have quite a few black widows around here.

Those critters that we would welcome more readily tend to be more of
the furry variety and are found in large numbers. These include but are
not limited to opossums, squirrels, raccoons, coyotes and little
gophers.

There are also plenty of hummingbirds, mocking birds, crows, owls,
hawks and a ton of other birds that I have no idea what they are.

Oh, and a gazillion lizards.

And then there are the bunnies.

Linda and I are actually quite fond of bunnies so it's always kind of
heartwarming to pull up in the driveway and have a couple bunnies
nibbling grass in your front yard, even more across the street in the
neighbors yard and dozens of them, their little ears sillohouetted by
the street light, having what Linda calls a "bunny sock hop" down at
the corner.

Tupelo Ridge Drive got it's name for a good reason. It runs along a
ridge line that slopes down to a small valley below. Rancho de los
Gatos sits at the highest point of the ridge and we love to sit out in
the backyard, drink Jameson and Cabernet and watch traffic streak past on Copperhill
Drive below us.

Inevitably, critters will enter what we like to call the 'Wildlife
Highway' through our yard. The property is surrounded by a block wall
that serves as a perfect onramp to a busy throroughfare for animals.

Since we've lived here I've been looking at Zillow.com or Google Maps
images and other satellite photos of this street. For the first couple
of years the best images available were older satellite photos taken
before this tract was built back in 1985. I thought that was kind of
strange since many of the neighborhoods around us are much newer yet
there were already high-res satellite images available of them to view
at street level magnification.

My street had older, lower-res images but you could still see that there were
no streets on this hill yet. There were simply paths made by off-road
vehicles which likely followed what were previously foot paths which
likely followed what were previously animal foot paths.

I believe critters had been following the Wildlife Highway for many
decades before many people lived around here. And so they still take
the same route to get to food stores and cocktail lounges.

Yesterday, I was carrying a bag of trash around to the dumpster at the
side of the house. I turned the corner from the garage and there, out
in the open, right on the concrete slab that could be an RV park if I
had such a thing, was a dead rat.

He was no small rat either. He (I'll just assume he was a male) was
gray and had a long rat tail. Just like a rat does. Actually he was
kind of cute ... if he wasn't a rat, on my property.

He showed no sign of trauma and foul play was not suspected. His demise is as big a mystery as the Black Dahlia.

I haven't actually seen a rat on the Wildlife Highway before but other
people have. My brother for instance, when he was here visiting last
summer, said he saw one getting on the onramp. I had my back turned at
the time.

So, we know they live here too.

And that's fine, as long as they don't want to come in, which would not be a very good idea for them anyway.

Having kitties rule your house has it's advantages.