These spectacular photos were shared by someone anonymously, but they are beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

Look what I saw at Venice Beach yesterday! A car from Juarez, Mexico! I have never seen any Mexican license plate in all my years in California but this one is from Juarez. Isn’t that the most dangerous city in the hemisphere? The murder capital of the world? That’s where all the drug dealers are. But what would this vehicle be doing at Venice Beach? All I saw there were street performers, sunglass kiosks, T-shirt shops, and bunch of medical marijuana shops. Hmmm, it’s a conundrum.

My sister came to town for the weekend with her two daughters and one granddaughter for some fun. We went to Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and shopped and ate ourselves into a near coma: a monster buffet, gourmet burgers, Benihana, Cheesecake Factory, Chicken Pot Pie at the Daily Grill, Pinkberry for dessert. Well… you can imagine. I was one slice of cheesecake away from needing my stretch pants! 🙂

I love Chinese food but everything I like is batter fried! So I finally mastered my own recipe for Orange-Sesame Chicken that is healthy, crazy good, and it cooks in less than ten minutes! You’ll need a couple of not-so-common ingredients like toasted sesame oil but this dish is so worth it. If you can’t find the toasted sesame oil or toasted sesame seeds, try the Asian section of your market, Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. It took me about ten tries to get it just right and now I have to share it.  I hope you don’t like leftovers because there won’t be any! Click here for the recipe.

I actually was inside Air Force One today! Denis and I went to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley and the real Air Force One is there, inside an enormous hangar. It’s a Boeing 707 and it flew seven presidents: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, and W. Bush. It’s huge! 152 feet long and the wingspan is 145 feet! No one could take pictures inside but it was so great to see where the presidents sat, all the (old school) computers, phones, fax machine, where the VIPs sat, and the press had to sit in the back, never allowed up front. Plus… the press didn’t fly free – they had to buy first class tickets. We also saw one particular seat where one person sat with a computer and he was the guy with all the nuclear codes. Always ready for anything, I guess. It was exciting to see it all in person, but this was not the highlight, my friends. The highlight of the trip was getting my senior discount. I asked for a senior ticket and got it. I said, “Aren’t you gonna card me?” “No.” Okay, that hurt a little.

1. I went to the mall today… actually, I didn’t get in because I could not find parking. Even the handicapped spaces were taken. How is it that so many handicapped people are driving a Lexus or Mercedes? Oh, I suppose they must have been injured, got one of those TV lawyers and won a big settlement and then spent the money on a luxury car. There could be no other explanation…

2. If a man says something when he’s alone in a forest and nobody hears him, is he still wrong? (this ponderance may be a reflection of how my day went today)

3. What happened to Charlie Sheen’s teeth?

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw another scorpion in the back yard. At first, it looked like a leaf but I’ve trained myself to study every dirt pile,  leaf, and stick in the back yard. This one looked just like some dried things that fall off the shrubs on the back hill… or ARE they dried things that fall off the shrubs? I used to go outside with my camera – now I go out with a magnifying glass! Seriously. And that scarf around my neck is not about fashion. I always think something’s crawling on my neck. This is no way to live!!!

I miss my blog! But I’ve been swamped with handling my stepmom’s affairs, getting some work done on the house, and we have house guests this week. Plus I’m trying to write another cookbook, make some more videos and trap some more squirrels, but who has the time? Now there’s a mole creating his own private highway across my lawn, and something left a big pile of poop in the back yard last night. Where’s the hawk when you need him? I’ll be back to blogging soon. Meantime, feel free to share your own details about what’s overwhelming you. I don’t want to be the lone whiner!

It’s one thing for me to post pictures I take in my back yard but quite another to take those photos and create a collage of all my back yard visitors. That’s exactly what my facebook friend, Brian, did in his spare time. He did such an awesome job and clearly spent a lot of time to do this, so I want everyone to see it. I love my backyard and consider all the visitors ‘family,’ even the ones I love to hate (like the mangy, rat-faced, no-good, low-life, beady-eyed, scum-sucking, tomato-stealing squirrels). If  all seventeen showed up at once, who would be the last one standing?  Who would escape? Who would become lunch? Would any of them work together as a team or would they backstab each other to survive? I know who would run & hide like a scared little girl…

I’ve never regretted telling the truth.  I can’t throw away a good jar. One size fits all is a crock.  Denis is the best hugger in the world. I have 47 spatulas but my car is 9 years old….my priorities are clear. No one wants to change the toilet paper roll, including me, so I always try to leave 2 or 3 squares of tissue on the roll so the next person has to deal with it.  Spiders can hold their breath for 19 hours – I didn’t need to know that. Stretch pants are nobody’s friend. Cookies are a waste of time without milk. “At the tone please leave your message…when you are finished recording, you may hang up or press one for more options.” If anyone has ever pressed one for more options, I’d like to know about it.