Category Archives: flowers

Up for Air

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early spring fig tree growthMorning cup of tea, and short reflection – coming up for air before diving back in…

It’s a bit of a mess here, time-wise. Just not enough hours in the day. Everything totally fragmented. Yesterday was grueling… here’s some of it:

Up at 5:30am, finding that I’m immediately thinking about a physics project for a bit (I fell asleep doing so, having been the whole evening in the Casbah drinking coffee and doing the same) before having to break off to get ready, get to office early to start an insanely busy day. Answer a ton of email, and deal with other online stuff, planning to ignore it for the whole rest of morning. Note that flimmaker/journalist friend B has sent me an email with a list of comments and suggested changes to my script for the Video. Got to discuss it with A, my collaborator in Chemistry on this. Whenever are we going to meet in the next few days? Sigh. (Must remember to do blog post about this new project, and how I ended up involved with the Chemistry department!)

After some dithering, decided to drive in, since the plan was to stay super-late and probably involve driving someone home.

Cold as I walk to the office from where I parked on the street. Mostly in my mind, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Spring Sprung

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No doubt about it: Spring has sprung. Whoever says there are no seasons in LA – and there are many who do – have no idea what they are talking about. The signs are in the air – there’s been a distinct change of the smell; lots of flowers are blooming. A parade of displays has begun. These are some of the poppies that are in various corners of the campus here at USC:

poppies

Here’s another shot…. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Hope Comes in Yellow and Green

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I decided to do Griffith Park for my Sunday morning hike today. It’s been a while – I’ve mostly been doing Runyon. I thought it would be nice to see how things were doing up there since I last went and saw them dramatically spraying the hydromulch to protect the ground from erosion until regrowth from the fire damage (see here and here). The (very) occasional rain we’ve had in the last couple of months seem to have begun something wonderful – there are hints of green everywhere. I saw this beautiful photograph at one point – which sort of says it all – only to find that my camera (which seems to be on its last legs these last few days) had died again. So I had to take it with my camera phone, and so it is a bit below par:

griffith park hope

I think this is wonderful (blurriness aside) – it has the striking image of the burned tree […] Click to continue reading this post →

All in a Weekend’s Work and Play

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I’ve been distracted by several things recently, and so (even more than is usually the case) there’s far more to report than there is time to report it. Among the highlights are, as already mentioned in the comments, a Saturday visit to MOCA (Geffen Contemporary) to see the Takashi Murakami exhibition. (Coinciding nicely with me about to embark upon reading “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by the other very well known Murakami: Haruki Murakami.)

murakami flower ball
His simplest motif – which he reuses again and again in many pieces – is the smiling flowers in various colours. The 2D version of the 3D flower box is one of my favourites, and here it is in a room that is wallpapered with the motif. There’s a more solemn one with a range of expressions on the flowers’ faces in an entire field of them (“Kawaii – Vacances”) (including one shedding a tear), but I could not find a good web reproduction of it. The below is a rather small version:

murakami: kawaii - vacances

It’s only the second weekend since it opened here in LA and it is hugely popular, with tons of people in the exhibit spaces walking around excitedly and pointing at things. (This being LA, this included a lot of activity in the special Louis Vuitton room, which […] Click to continue reading this post →

Yellow in Green

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[Post reconstruction in progress after 25.10.07 hack (body, comments and images to follow)]:

We had rain again! Quite a big deal here. Well, this meant that some rose bushes that I’d been letting grow well out of control were bent over with the weight of the water. So lots of pruning yesterday. Here’s one of the sweetly scented blooms I harvested along the way:

yellow rose in vase

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