Grand Canyon Bound

I’m going on an actual, for real, vacation. It’s just a week and we’re driving there. We’re going to the Grand Canyon which I have never seen. I’ve always wanted to go and so Dean, who is probably the best trip organizer in the world, arranged the whole thing. I think he gets this skill from his years at the State Department in the late 90’s  arranging travel and events for international artists arriving on cultural exchanges. Anyhow, we’re doing this whole camping and electric bike tour then we’re going to two architectural sites — Talisien West and Arco Santi — also places on my bucket list. Finally we’re stopping in Santa Fe at a spa for some hot springs time. I love hot water. I had to shut off the jacuzzi here at home because we were getting crazy expensive electric bills. Sometimes I go to the jacuzzi at my gym but it’s not the same. Plus there are these guys who look like Josef Stalin who hang out there in full hair sweaters giving me the stink eye.

I had a meeting with my department head tonight. She’s in Ojai so we met on Zoom. She hates when people want to meet on Zoom unless she wants to meet on Zoom and then there’s no problem. Ha ha ha. I can never really understand that mindset – just full entitlement. Maybe I’d have been more successful in my career if I’d been really entitled. I don’t think so to be honest. Two things you can’t fake: ego and mediocrity. Anyhow, all the other departments want screenwriting to solve their crappy script problem. The directors submitted a round of scripts that uniformly sucked. Then they vetoed doing any of the scripts written by screenwriters. Then they want the screenwriters to come in and fix their sucky scripts instead of just making films of the screenwriter’s original scripts which don’t suck. This, in a nutshell is everything that’s wrong with the world. The worst people just keep getting whatever they want. That’s why we can’t have sensible gun laws or the metric system in this country: the worst people call the shots.

Over the weekend we installed a sprinkler system in the back yard of our house and our rental unit. Dean is great at travel planning but he sucks at watering the plants, walking the dog and feeding the turtles. Fortunately most of our yard is a cactus garden now. With climate change, water scarcity and all most of our friends here are doing the same. Cacti and succulents with a gravel bed. I don’t hate it, to be honest but LA has always been a place where you don’t have to buy fruit because it’s everywhere. I’ve been able to get avocados, lemons, oranges, grapes, figs, tomatoes, limes, grapefruit, plumbs and peaches for free from either my yard or my neighbors or just on a walk with the dog. I really wanted a good avocado tree and lime tree because those two fruits have gotten really expensive since the Mexican mafia took over those crops after we legalized pot. Oops. Who knew legalizing pot would turn the Mexican mafia into… farmers? Well, really deadly farmers who behead the competition, but farmers. Point of story, I don’t want to subsidize the Mexican Mafia so I figured I’d be better off growing my own — and that’s why the sprinkler system. Saudi Arabia is the reason I have solar panels on my roof and drive an electric car. But that’s enough virtue signaling for today.

An ambulance just tore down Hyperion and the coyotes are howling like mad. They don’t bark but chirp and let off these insane peels of yip yip yip! I used to think it was kind of exciting — I live in the wild West. Los Angeles, the frontier. But now coyotes are to Los Angeles what rats are to New York. They’re everywhere and they’re not cute.