as soon as the dogs were walked the Monday following Mother’s Day we headed down the

coast to El Granada for another celebratory lunch. This one entailed my brother Kirk’s

quesadillas on the deck with the fugitive Mayor of Rossland BC*, her spouse DC as well Kirk and Brenda, oldest son Tyler and Olive, the most grateful dog any of us had ever met**.

*My sister Kathy, who’d taken advantage of her dual citizenship to come south for vaccine, grandmotherly duties and the retrieval of her motorcycle, was cycling back into alarums raised by her political opponents.  Bad optics.

**Olive, a mature rescue dog who’d languished lengthily un-adopted in a shelter on the Peninsula, was eventually taken in by Kirk and Brenda’s temporary tenant. She definitely seemed not only poignantly aware of past precariousness but touchingly appreciative of her present good fortune.

We all had a swell time, returning in the ever “interesting” Bay Area Traffic [55 minutes down, hour and 35 back] to find the new-to-me truck’s overload springs still propped up out front,

unstolen. The next morning went to setting up the spring install and then Concord in hopes of undoing the damage Willey’s guy had done to the camper shell’s rear window years back loading batteries.  Unfortunately the company that made it is long out of business but Mobile Living was most helpful nonetheless, in the end giving me the bit to remove the existing mess.

Unfortunately [again] one last recalcitrant screw precluded THAT notion so I gave up in favor of lunch in the garden where we were joined at the end by the dapper David Dodd, Benicia’s beloved librarian, who graciously helped us finish off most of the rest of Dana’s Famous Pie. 

Early Wednesday, while L ventured over to the freezing heights of Pacific Heights to inaugurate “Worlds”, a sculpture commissioned for University High School, I walked dogs one after another

before  a trip to Pedro’s for hardware and the drill bit

to extract the recalcitrant screw, which remained unfortunately recalcitrant

but later, in addition to or while marveling at the Courageous Ace, I figured a way to somewhat

straighten the bent frame without removing it.  Good enough for who it’s for until fall anyway.

Cooler air and springlike conditions [sans green hills], Russ’ roses, our bougainvillea and

a week with the A-team elsewhere; Shawn finishing up a proposal, Scott driving a truck back from Ohio…as for me, temporarily bewildered by days with Nowhere to Go,

I eventually managed to temporarily focus on the studio’s glacial progressions.

Saturday Sumi and I ran into a guy who’d found an artwork “free” in the alley outside Elviarita’s he remembered from when his family’s clothing store had been there. I sent the image to my friend Stephen, who’d collected these things in the past and soon heard back with Information 

and Opinion…”Now I’ve looked closely at that picture. It has all the markings in the margins of the printer etc in Paris.  And is the appropriate size for posters of the period, similar to our Mistinquette, which makes me think it is a vintage print. Also the margins of the cheap poster paper are faded sepia which also makes me think it is genuine. It could well be worth several thousand…” So that was quite a score for the clothier’s heir; one of Leonetto Cappiello’s most famous images.

We have our famous images too, of course…