Dodging a bullet
(Click on the pic for a bigger image.) We gasped when we saw this sign yesterday, stuck in the window of a store in Little Tokyo, in downtown LA.
But we forget this is a gun-totin' country.
In the early hours of the morning, there'd been a shoot-out on the 101, the Hollywood Freeway. No-one was killed, thank heavens, but the freeway was closed for about eight hours. It must have re-opened just a couple of hours before we whizzed blissfully along it on another fab day up in the big smoke. Lucky we missed all the drama, let alone the traffic nightmare ...
The Big Smoke was an appropriate term for LA yesterday.
As you can see from this pic I took on the outskirts, it wasn't a good-air day.
But it was still fabulous.
I finally got to see the stunningly beautiful Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.
It's my third Gehry building (I'm collecting them!), after the open-air concert shell in Chicago, and the Experience Music Project building in Seattle.
I reckon it's time Perth had one! Imagine how good it'd look by the river ...
We took in the big exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois and Martin Kippenberger at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, then walked a few blocks to the Geffen Center at MOCA, which was a little underwhelming and ever so slightly disappointing.
Then we were off to the Americana centre in Glendale for dinner, 
and ate at Katsuya by Starck, a sort of Japanese-American restaurant where — we heard in a neighbouring store — Britney Spears had been dining only the night before and told off for smoking.
And we pinched ourselves when we ended up here ... 
for a preview screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the hot new Cate Blanchett movie. It was okay, but oh! so long — almost three hours. Weird, considering it was an adaptation of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Cate's always a treat to watch in action, and Brad Pitt, her co-star, is always just lovely!
Wintry lovelies
Winter here means crisp blue skies, hummingbirds, sunshine, 
and strelitzia. Lovely!:: I don't rave about it enough, but here's a completely irrelevant shot of part of the interior of our San Diego restaurant, the Bondi, so you can see how absolutely bloody gorgeous it is!
Proudly Australian, with jarrah and steel and Sydney bluestone and iron-ore rock. You beauty!:: David is making a very big deal of the fact that on the FedEx website he can track the journey of the Christmas present he has bought for me.It started its journey in Kunshan, in China, at 7.23pm last Saturday and went from there to Subic Bay in the Philippines, then to Anchorage Alaska.And right now he's chortling as he tells me that it left Anchorage last night.What can it be? He's still laughing ... (he's getting three pairs of socks from me). (And some very daggy, saggy, baggy Y-fronts.):: I ought to be doing housework. But then, why is this so? And why is this so for me and not for David? Hmmm?I'm going to quilt instead. So ya boo sucks to Mr Dyson (have I ever told you how much I loathe my Dyson vacuum cleaner?).:: I've posted lots and lots of family pics on my facebook page, and you can have a look — even if you are not a facebook frequenter — by clicking on this link— and then clicking on each of the photos to read the captions. Only if you're interested, though!
We've had some really cold days and nights, and earlier in the week we had lots and lots of wonderful rain, so up in the high country to the east of us there's been snow.
— it took my breath away whenever we stepped out of her warm and cosy house. 
But oh! It all looked so gorgeous!
There's been lots and lots of snow up in the Pacific North-West, even on Vancouver Island in Canada. Lily's friend Grace arrived at Seattle airport and freezing weather after having left Buenos Aires and 40 degrees (104 F)!
