glass houses

i woke up first today. I saw the blue sky through a corner of window (i wrote "winter" first), and leapt at the chance. while others slept i cycled through the mt.hope cemetary, up and around the contours, by frederick douglass and susan b. I cycled across the street into the highland park (and a coniferous scent), up by the reservoir, by the "rock garden" and down by the conservatory. my bicycle leaned against a fence, i went inside and wandered through a southwest desert and some tropics, with banana trees and banyan trees and vanilla vines and epiphytes and orchids on the wall.

as far as municipal botanical gardens go, the highland park conservatory is pretty mediocre, and it has an entire room, in a vertigo-inducing fit of bizarreness, dedicated to pointsettas; but it's a constant 80 degrees and about half a mile from here. (-: of course the big glass house full of the world's horticultural staples quickly had me imagining geodesic greenhouses, full of aquaculture and other niftiness and made me want to go get some wooden dowels to build a model. just as reading about sailing the coast of baja had me imagining a dingi and tomsawyering the genesee. but right now the empty refrigerator is inspiring me to go to the grocery store...

p.s. my new user icon is a frame shot of me sitting outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the banner advertises the exhibition, "Made in California."