Late night here in Los Angeles. If you were here right now you would think I had thick night-blooming jasmine & honeysuckle vines coiled just outside every window. The scent of flowers has been perfuming the air all night. If you were to step out onto the porch and sit in the glider you would feel almost drunk with the sweetness. The intense heat today must have forced thousands of perfumed blossoms to unfurl across the entire city. Every year I wait for this scent to return and it always does, lingering for weeks. I have never smelled it anywhere else but here. One more reason, as if I needed any more, to fall in love with LA.
I enrolled in Spanish classes tonight online. This is my 3rd visit to San Miguel de Allende. Each time I go I rent a house and study Spanish. I love waking up early in Mexico, going to sit up on the azotea, or roof-top terrace, drinking my cup of coffee, and writing in my journal. Then I meander through the cool cobblestone streets to class. Last year I arrived for the first day of class with my shirt inside out. I didn’t even notice until I’d been in the class for an hour.
Today my sister emailed me the journal page up at the top there. It has very handy instructions for what to do if you are being chased by a posse. Not a cat posse – a real one. I guess someone’s planning on breaking the law when she’s in Mexico. Here are the steps in case you need to know: change horses often, shoot your last horse, and never ride the same trail twice. I don’t know where she comes up with these things. I for one will be captured by a wild band of desperados before I would ever shoot my horse. And “change horses often” implies some sort of horse thievery is involved. Don’t they hang horse thieves? It’s a good thing one of us is thinking logically otherwise we could get in a whole mess of trouble.
I’m posting a few photos of a couple of books I have in my BOOKSHELF links. Both are on the obscure side and the utter coolness of the contents can’t be seen from the book jacket thumbnail. The reason I got Century Girl was because of the visual journal style of the pages. There are hundreds of pages just like these to keep a person busy for a long time. 
Blackstock’s Collections is fascinating wth a capital F. Especially if you’ve seen the U-tube interview that Anne Grigch did with Gregory Blackstock. It’s easy to find by searching with his name on U-tube. Now there is someone you do not want to be running from a posse with. Not because it wouldn’t be interesting, but he might take too long cateloging all the varieties of cow dung along the way. 
Finally here’s a few portraits I did of my sister a few years back. When I go out to visit her in Kansas I pump her full of martinis and force her to pose for me. She moves around a lot on purpose when I’m drawing her just so my drawings come out bad. Like I tell her, I can’t be held responsible for the way these turn out. I just draw what I see.
I keep wondering “can it get any better”? And the answer is most certainly YES YES YES!
what makes me say this you ask? the portrait your second grader did of you… it is a remarkable likeness of you when you are thinking BAD thoughts. It is almost as good as all the pictures you have done of me which by the way are extremely hilarious and yet quite true to the subject matter – each of them capturing a unique aspect of my personality. Lets do giant oil paintings of each other in San Miguel! (nude of course)