365 Photo Project - Day 252

Taken: September 9, 2010

Location: Rutherford, CA

Whenever I say I live in Northern California wine country, most people assume I mean Napa Valley. Sonoma County is still behind Napa in terms of tourists if not its equal in winemaking. I would say most of us are very much okay with that as Napa has become very tourist-oriented and traffic can be awful there. That aside, every few weeks or so, I find myself driving through Napa -- in this case I was staying in St. Helena for a week to watch a friend's wonderful 13-year-old while they were away.

I had a chance to take a drive around the valley and it was one of those days that make you glad to be alive. Temperate and sunny with some post-rain clouds drifting harmlessly across a bright, blue sky. Just beautiful. I didn't have my camera with me so I snapped this shot with my iPhone 4 hrough my windshield on a two-lane cut-through road between the well-travelled Rte 29 and the Silverado Trail.

I pulled over about a mile down the road, got out my notebook and wrote under the shade of a row of olive trees. The thing about moving -- and committing to staying on in wine country is that you get reminders every day why the choice is such a natch. I guess the day I get sick of the view will be the day I move somewhere else. Not expecting that to happen anytime soon.

365 Photo Project - Day 242

Taken: August 30, 2010

Location: Healdsburg, CA

I shot this from the road where I live. My house would be off and out of frame to the right. I love the drama of the moment -- a late afternoon day on the day of or right after the first rain we got in months. No matter how much I've come to love color images and certainly no matter how easy it gets to work with them in the digital world, I'll always love the black and white shots the best. More of my Dad's influence no doubt.

365 Photo Project - Day 222

Taken: August 10, 2010

Location: Healdsburg, CA

Late-afternoon August sunset off the porch of my house in Healdsburg. This is one image I didn't edit at all. I imported into Photoshop and played around with it but I kept going back to the original. I know it's far from perfect but I like it. 

365 Photo Project - Day 157

Taken: June 6, 2010, approx. 1 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, Ca.

To know me is to know how much I love to drive. Bliss is an open road, a full iPod on loud and a 5-speed.  When I dream of going places, I dream of going there in a bad-ass set of wheels. And when I dream of roads, this is the kind that make my heart beat faster. I've always been drawn to landscapes and I'm a big sucker for the way certain kinds of two-lanes wind through certain kinds of bucolic countrysides.

I don't think I'm ever so much at peace then when I'm writing at my keyboard or sitting behind the wheel driving through some place beautiful. No place where my mind is as sharp or as clear either.

I know I'm not alone -- you could fill a thousand iPods with a small percentage of songs written for the road, not to mention all the books and films -- but every time I hit a good road and a great song is playing on my stereo, I can feel the laughter in my heart, the buzz in my gut. Just pure happiness. Wish I could bottle that feeling and take it out whenever I'm stuck inside in the slow lane.

In a particularly rough time in my life, I started to drive around in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wouldn't leave my house until midnight and I'd often drive around in circles but I would stay out almost all night. I lived in LA and the goal was to see if I could stay out until dawn which is when I'd stop just to watch the sun rise over over the Valley or the Pacific or some freeway somewhere.

There's a certain kind of power behind the wheel of a car that everyone feels -- the being wrapped in a ton of steel kind -- and while it makes some people too damned aggressive, I always reveled in it. It was my layer of steel between me and the world, my way of doing and yet observing. Those all-night drives would end with me writing pages and pages of notes, trying to capture everything I was thinking about, ideas, stories, lines, characters. Sometimes I read those notes and I laugh or cry and shudder at them, but they almost always take me back to a road somewhere in the dark with music playing and the feel of my engine rumbling beneath me. And then I go looking for my keys.

365 Photo Project - Day 155

Taken: June 4, 2010
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

Yeah, I know. Another landscape but I like this shot because it's the view I see every day off our porch. Plus you really get a sense of how quickly the weather changes here. The bright blue in the bottom left of the image is slowly taking over the sky from the dark clouds. An hour from when this was shot, the sky was mostly sun and the clouds were relegated to the background again. It was very cool and spectacular to watch unfold.

365 Photo Project - Day 142

Taken: May 22, 2010, noon
Location: Healdsburg, Ca.

Yes, I know, another vineyard and sky image. But look at those clouds. How could I not take this one?
Life, once again, seems to be filling my days with too much to do and too little time to do it. I've been trying to stay abreast of this, but I can't seem to keep up. Tonight, I'm putting up three days of posts. So there won't be much writing.
As you can see from the image, we've had a lot of weather. It's been an odd month of May, with days on end where the sun and the clouds seem in a constant battle for supremacy. I've seen two rainbows this month and twice, have driven through a pouring rain one moment that turns to sunshine minutes later. I don't want to make too much of it, but it's hard not to believe in global warming plan you experience such rapid-fire changes in the weather.
It's not that I don't like it. Believe me, after more than a decade in Los Angeles, a change in the weather within even a five-day period is welcome. Down in LA, anything besides sunny and 70 degrees is just weird.
But even saying that, I'm ready for summer. I want to sit on my porch and look out on the view and feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I don't want to be cold at night, not at least until late September when the hot weather will be what gets on my nerves.
I love describing weather and of course, finding a way to link it emotionally or psychologically to whatever it is I'm writing. It's a great way to set certain kinds of scenes as well. But I don't check the weather daily and I'm often surprised when I wake up and it's raining.
And as much as I like a little change in the seasons, I don't think there's anything that could get me to move back to the East Coast, or any place that has real winters. Hell, I love snow but the slush and slippery ice, the brutal cold and chilly winds -- you can keep all that stuff. I want nothing to do with it.
When I moved out to Los Angeles, my father told me that he was sure I would return to the East Coast within two years, three tops. He had been out in Southern California when he served in the Navy in the 1950s, and like any experience that happens to you when you're young, it left an indelible impression on him. That impression wasn't a good one. A born and bred New Yorker, my father didn't quite understand the West Coast temperament. I think it felt too new to him, too much like it was temporary.
This is a rap that has dogged Los Angeles even as it has grown into a relative middle age. Like any cliché, it is not entirely untrue. Certainly when my father was there, it undoubtedly felt a lot more like the reality. He has only been out there I think two more times, both of them to visit me. I'm here to report that it did not change his opinion. My one regret is for the first time they arrived. I didn't know Los Angeles as well as I would come to know it and I wasn't sure yet how the relationship would turn out.
When I first arrived, I immediately started a job that put me on the road for most of the next 2 1/2 years. I hardly had a chance to stop and get to know my neighborhood, much less the city itself. A combination of factors, including, ironically, the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, forced me to discover the the City of Angels and began what has been an uninterrupted love affair.
When the 10 Freeway went down during the quake, it forced many of us who relied on what was one of the busiest freeways in the country, to take surface streets. Up to that point, I was so concerned about getting where I needed to go for work -- and I was working seven days a week -- that I didn't bother veering off the freeway or learning shortcuts. My days off were spent catching up on sleep and TV and reading, I had very few friends outside of work and not much time to spend looking for any. Suddenly, I was having to learn how to navigate all these streets I'd seen only as signs on the freeway. It changed everything I knew and everything I thought I knew about LA.

I am sure everyone who moves to a new place has this same experience, one way or another. And eventually they get to the point where I finally did when you can close your eyes, and see the once complicated seeming grid of streets and buildings and skylines and know exactly where most everything is -- more or less.

But when my parents arrived, my knowledge of LA wasn't that much more than your typical tourist.  I didn't really know where to take them or where to eat or even the best way to get there. And while I covered a little bit of my Los Angeles on their second trip, which was in the early part of the last decade, I was a different person then. I was living with someone, we'd bought a house, got a dog. It wasn't the same LA I'd discovered as a single working woman, unattached, free to roam.

I think there's only one time in your life when you fall in love for a place and a friend or parent or a sibling will come to visit and you are in that perfect mode to share what makes it magical for you. With LA and my parents, I think I blew it.
Had my parents come to visit me a year or two after Northridge, I would have shown them the Los Angeles of my dreams, the one I came to write about in my novels, the place that will occupy a little room in my heart forever. I believe I may even have won over my father, if only a little. I would have totally done it different that's for sure.
Even so, I know they understand a little because my Los Angeles is also in the pages of my novels, at least I hope it is. Of course, for my father to admit that he was wrong about me, is something else entirely. It's been a bit longer than three years since I've moved out to California and I'm sure he knows by now, I ain't going back. 

I will always be a New Yorker, but I'm now a Californian too. And I'm totally okay with that. I know he is too.

365 Photo Project - Day 117

Taken: April 27, 2010, 5:30 p.m.
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

I promised myself I wouldn't post too many of these kinds of shots even though around here, temptation is everywhere.  All you gotta do is turn one way or the other and there they are just waiting. Calling out for you to just stop and snap. And occasionally, I do just that.

Such a day was today, I just couldn't help it. After the rain last night and most of the day, the sky was painted blue and white, dark and light -- like it was a psychedelic's trippy dream. It was very neat -- enough that when I stopped to pick up the mail at the bottom of our hill, I decided to take a few shots. I really expected to use a different image but I couldn't get away from this one.

The one saving grace is that I don't think I've taken this shot before -- normally I take them looking south (I don't know why, I just do). This one is looking north toward Healdsburg's town center.

Anyway, I hope y'all won't mind one more wine country photo op.

I shot this with my K100D and edited in Photoshop.

365 Photo Project - Day 104

Taken: April 14, 2010, Noon
Location: Healdsburg, Ca

Maybe some people get tired of seeing landscapes like this every day but I don't. This is actually on my road -- I drive by it every single day. And every day, rain or shine, there's something amazing about it. We've been getting lots of post rain clouds lately that have been taking residence in the crisp blueness of the sky like so many cotton balls. Today, there was a line of them drifting quickly across the lower horizon.

I love the way scenes like these pass by my window as I drive -- like little movies in my mind. I've always been inspired by the natural world. When I was a kid, I found it on Cape Cod during our summers there. The sun and sand, wind and sea -- and yeah, those big-ass storms that would roll in off the Atlantic and bring heavy rains and winds that rattled the walls of our summer house. I would lie awake late at night, peering over the covers as the big rain drops slapped loudly against the window. The trees thrashed and moaned, like monsters trying to get inside.

Lying there, I would make up stories and people them with characters of my imagination but I almost never wrote them down. I tried to remember them in the morning they were never as interesting as when I came up with them during the storms. Guess I needed the drama.

When I'm getting close to finishing a new project, I drive around a lot, listening to my iPod and taking in the world around me. I know it sounds corny, but I try to just be in the moment. Let my senses experience the sounds, the smells, the view. Stop for a second, breathe in, breath out and just sort of let my mind reboot. The act of driving itself has always helped me work through thinking problems but there's nothing like stopping the car, getting out and standing at the edge of a vineyard or a field or a line of tall oaks and gaze out at that forever and a day view in front of you. Nothing to do but bow to loveliness of nature and make sure to keep your voices down, inside and out.

I shot this with my K100D, edited it slightly in Photoshop.

365 Photo Project - Day 84

Taken: March 25, 2010, Noon
Location: Healdsburg, Ca.

I'm afraid I don't have much to say today, either. It's Thursday and I had to really bear down to get my allotment of pages done so I can make my personal deadline by the end of the week. Now, I'm running home to make dinner. For anyone who knows me, this is a risky venture to say the least as my cooking skills border on the nonexistent. But my husband, the gourmand of the family by a good measure, put down the gauntlet. He challenged me to make the sweet and sour stuffed cabbage rolls that I used to make when I was in college. The best way to get me to do something is to say I can't do it. I'm a sucker that way.

Credit my parents. They made me a believer, always telling me there was nothing I couldn't accomplish, always reminding me the world was my oyster, out there for the taking, out there for whoever wanted it more. So okay, I'm way more cynical about life now. I'm not going to ever play shortstop for the New York Mets. I realize there are forces at work that want to crush your spirit, that do not care how pure your heart or noble your cause. People lie, they cheat, they fail you. They also die. Shit happens and it happens at the most inopportune moments and lightning, when it's bad, does strike twice. At least. Assholes and dickheads get rewarded. You can work hard, leave it all there on the page and still end up unemployed at the end of the day. The school of hard knocks spares no one.

My friend says everything, good and bad, is an opportunity for learning and growing. I realize there's a bit of Zen in that, that it requires a view of the world that isn't beaten and world weary. It requires a certain amount of charity for humanity, which if you've lived through the Bush Administration for example, you know can be a very hard idea to wrap your head around. Seriously, it's hard to view the world that way. Everybody knows the losses can suck and suck the life out of you. And the really bad ones can drag you down with their weight until you're trapped at the very bottom of the cold and dark ocean floor of your life. Some days it seems impossible to swim upward. Some days it's just easier to stop fighting. Some days it feels like the rats win.

But where's the sport in giving up? I mean as corny as dusting yourself off and picking your ass up actually sounds, if you consider the choices out there, it's not like there's better options. The hard way highway is the only way.  But that's the whole point. As Garrison Keillor once said when he was still writing the Mr. Blue column for Salon.com, "It's a shallow life that doesn't have a few scars."

Remember my favorite 13-year-old? The one who loves baseball? Well, his Mom told me today that he likes to say, "If you're having a hard time, just think of kittens. There isn't anything bad about kittens." Now that's a philosophy I can get behind. That's a view of the world worth having.

I shot this with my K100D. It's a shot of one of the oaks in our "backyard" at a very interesting time of the day today. It was sunny and yet still raining and the storm clouds were sitting low -- above them you could just see the coming rush of blue skies and sunshine. A lovely thought I think. That and kittens.

365 Photo Project - Day 41

Taken: February 10, 2010, sunset

Location: I-5 North, near Kamm Avenue

Spent most of the day rolling north up the I-5 toward home. I made good time actually. Traffic was minimal and the trip provided very few surprises. Good to be home with the pugs and the man and in my own bed for the first time in more than two weeks.

I normally dread driving the Grapevine and the Tejon Pass was windy as hell. But the views were spectacular. Big bold sky that seemed to go on forever reaching out to crystal clear mountain peaks in the distance, some of which were snow-topped.

The whole trip was unusually weather-free for this time of year and most important, clear and dry with the occasional heavy cross-winds. There was this one trucker hauling a boat-load of BMWs who couldn't seem to keep his tail steady. He kept passing me when I pulled off for one of my pitstops. Sorta was hoping a 5-series would fall off his truck but alas, last time I saw him he was maintaining a fairly straight line. 

I stopped to take photos along the Grapevine, hoping the dramatic clouds would prove a good backdrop but once again, I was foiled by my mind's eye. It was this shot, taken near sunset about 100 miles south of the 580 West connector that turned out to be my choice for today's photo. 

I took this exit just to see what I could capture in the fading light of a beautiful California day and did some editing and touch-up with Photoshop. Used the trusty K100D again with the 50mm lens.

365 Photo Project - Day 39

Taken: February 8, 2010, 2:10 p.m.
Location: Burbank, Ca

Had a meeting in Burbank today and thought it was lucky that I had to park on the roof of the building -- it was so clear I figured snapping a few shots up there would give me some good choices for today's photo. Without fail, none of them won me over quite like this one which I snapped leaning out my car window while waiting at a red light off on Alameda. Funny how these things work.

I'm a sucker for the way these glassy buildings reflect the sky and loved how this one mirrored the clouds even as it was set against them. Coolness. Though I'd have been happier if I had more time to get the exposure right. Serves me right for not pulling over and doing this right. Live and learn.

Taken with my K100D and edited in Photoshop.

365 Photo Project - Day 37

Taken: February 6, 2010, approx. 3 p.m.
Location: Palisades Park, Santa Monica, CA

I have always lived on one coast or the other, never in the middle. I've found homes in big cities and small towns, in suburbs and planned communities, in urban neighborhoods and at the end of cul de sacs. East, West, North, South. Upstairs, in the basement and at the end of two-mile dirt roads. Wherever  I've called home has brought a degree of tranquility. Yet I have found that I am never more at peace than when I can be near the sea.

I didn't grow up on the water but my parents used to take us to Martha's Vineyard every summer (and often for one- or two-week trips in between) and it was there I came to love living near water. I'm not a classic seafaring type. I don't much like swimming in it and while I admire surfers, I'm not coordinated enough to do that. I love to sail but I'm no expert and I'm too impatient to be good at fishing or even sunbathing.

What I love is just being in the ocean's neighborhood. The smell of sand and seaweed, of fish and salt and that particular way a good sea breeze can clear out your sinuses and cleanse your soul. I love sitting on a creaky wooden dock, listening to the pinging of halyard on mast, the slapping of the wake against fiberglass hulls, the soft cooing of birds, the whoosh of the tide. I love getting lost in the endless layers of things that float in on the wind. If I can dip my toes in the ocean at the same time, well that's just gravy.

Our house in Santa Monica was just close enough to the beach that you could hear the waves at night. Off in the distance, it would mix with the sounds of the traffic on Pico Blvd. Perfect sleeping weather although I often found myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, quietly listening. In the morning as the marine layer would slowly burn off, the scent of the sea was everywhere, reminders of our proximity to the Pacific. I miss that.

These days, I live close enough to the water -- 35 minutes by car -- that the longing to be near the ocean isn't piercing and there's always my regular trips to L.A. to quench my thirst. But I know without a doubt that someday I'll have to return to my sea and my sea-gazing for real.  For now, I'll take fleeting moments like today when I stood out at Palisades Park in between (and during) the rains and marveled at the way the sun sparkled through cloud patterns, how the surface of the ocean rippled gently in a cold breeze, seemingly stretching out forever, endless.  Even a passing storm's fat drops of cold rain couldn't interrupt the magic of the moment.

This image was as close as I could get to capturing it. Taken with my k100D, 55mm lens and edited in Photoshop.