My LA life and other foreigners....

LA wildlife has been interesting. Lots of geckos running around keeping Daisy busy. She only goes nose to nose with them. There are birds nesting everywhere, telling us off for sitting on the patio under their nests. There was a Coyote on road in front of the house when we opened the garage. We’d let the dogs on the drive and suddenly panicked when we saw the coyote. Daisy would have been a goner – one mouthful, I think.

At the Food Bank, I’m feeling more and more like part of the team. They let me run the music and be DJ for the speaker they have outside and so I try and get lots of British bands in – which they seem to like. There was a customer who had travelled all over the world as a student then ended up in a Kibbutz and then stayed there for 32 years! You meet some remarkably interesting people here. I once wanted to go to a Kibbutz when I was about 15, but I soon got over it! David who had collapsed at the Food Bank last month is recovering well, but not back with us yet. Loads of volunteers have been going back to work, as things are opening up now and that means we are getting lots of new people – weird thing is that I’m now seen as part of the old crew and have been training them. There was a TV advert last week for food bank donations and it showed a lady teacher as an example of who would be in need here. It was shocking. Teachers don’t get paid all year round and are paid badly, I’m told, so most have second jobs to make ends meet – who on earth would want to do it under those conditions – crazy!

Mark and I have been on a cooking course over the last 14 weeks. Every Saturday we’d drive to Brentwood area to Chef Eric’s Culinary School and dress in our whites with our masks and blue gloves and learn the basics of cooking. I have to say that cooking was always a bit of a chore for me and unless it’s in one pot, I can’t get excited by all the timings of what to put on when. We went from knife skills in week one, cutting precise batons, juliennes and paysannes, with me trying not to cut the ends off my gloves (which for some reason happened every week), to cooking full menus such as airline chicken stuffed with goats cheese, sautéed potatoes, filleted trout in almond beurre, cheese soufflés etc. in the last few weeks. By week 8, we were being taught to plate up and unfortunately my idea was to put all the food I’d cooked onto a plate – obviously you might say. Mark and I were the first to finish that week and we put our plates full of lovely grub on the presentation table…. only to see our fellow students bring out their beautiful nouvelle cuisine type plates, with piped potatoes, sliced and fanned meat and pretty veg….it was somewhat humiliating, but also funny – we all had a good laugh about it. We got to know our classmates well over the weeks, many were going on to work in restaurants or getting better positions in kitchens. Mark still loves the cooking….and me….well, I’ve just cemented my love going to restaurants! Hoooorrraaaaay to lay-ins on Saturday mornings again!

Mark has a new car, Mercedes soft top, which is better than the Jag as we can take passengers and also it’s the right height for me to get out gracefully without having to kind of fallout which was very embarrassing when you used the valet.

I’ve changed my gynecologist from Gyno Gary to a new Lady Doctor as Gary was moving his practice to Brentwood and what some doctors do here is to get their clients to pay for the privilege of belonging to that practice – a con I would say. I also had my primary care Doctor tell me that I had been prescribed too many pills and so after a review and more blood work, I have come off the pellet and Armor thyroid which was making me feel ill and now with a far more sensible lady doctor who I feel I can talk too. Its weird here as you have to make sure all your specialists have all your information as they don’t seem to talk to each other.

We’ve also both had our Moderna vaccinations and whilst we both felt a bit rubbish after the second injection, we are so glad we did it. There are still people who refuse to get it done here and the government has a big push trying to encourage the antivaxxers – they want their freedom….. they’ll get it when they are vaccinated of course.

Maeve bought me a concert with an Eagles cover band called TLR (who are famous in their own right in California), at the Canyon Club in Santa Clarita. It was such a cool place! They insisted on everyone having their vaccination cards with them – it was glorious seeing live music again!! When I told a couple of people at ceramics, they seemed horrified and felt it was against people’s rights to have to show the vaccination card. I say ….tough…..

We had a wonderful few days in Montecito, staying in a beach condo on Miramar beach. The sound of the sea was so loud, but we loved it. Houses are worth millions there, it’s no wonder Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres and of course Harry and Megan live there. Amazingly we saw our second roundabout ( there is one small one in Calabasas), only they call it a traffic circle and no one really knows how to drive around it. I learnt to drive in Basingstoke which lets face it is roundabout city!!!

Los Angeles Times: “Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted Tuesday of murdering George Floyd in a landmark trial that centred on police brutality and spoke to a nation shaken over the last year by protests against racial injustice and demands to reform law enforcement.”

BUT…….Last week, 10 miles from the courthouse where Chauvin’s trial played out, a white officer in the suburb of Brooklyn Centre shot and killed 20 year old black resident Daunte Wright. Officials said the officer, a 26-year veteran, mistook her gun for her Taser……

Birthday party shooting- 7 Dead, Including Gunman, In Shooting At Birthday Party In Colorado Springs

Authorities said a suspect entered a birthday party and shot several victims before shooting and killing himself.

This week…..shooting at the Valley Transportation Authority. Eight people and the gunman, a male employee at the site, were dead. Another victim, who had been critically wounded, died Wednesday night at Santa Clara Valley Medical Centre.

To honour USA’s Mother’s Day this year in May, the NRA put out this advert….”mama didn’t raise no victim” with a picture of a mum and her 6-7 year old daughter holding assault rifles – the NRA are so morally corrupt! I decided I could complain and marked it on Twitter as offensive and abusive!

The latest from the NRA is that they are putting forward new legislation to make gun buying easier- despite the mass shootings. It’s gone to the Supreme Court - interesting they’ve waited for a very conservative court.

In Texas, the rangers want to legalise cloned deer to make them bigger for tourist hunters who’ll pay up to $10k to do it. Only in America….

In other news…..A New Hampshire family’s gender reveal party set off reports of an earthquake, and could be heard from across the state line, police said. Last year a gender reveal party set off a series of explosions and fires here. Nuts!

Lyndsey Graham (Trumps right hand man – no scrub that- right cheek brown noser), used Fox News to promote his fundraising campaign, after complaining he didn’t have enough money to carry on his campaigning. He set up a lottery competition, where the prize is to have lunch with himself and Trump at Mar Largo after a morning of golf- what a load of BS!

Thank goodness for Biden…in a sea of Trump following QAnon nutters (we are renaming in from GOP to GQP), Biden gave heart-warming speech about ...well...looking after people! What an amazing concept!!

He also waivers the Covid 19 vaccine patent- they making billions in profit, and it was started by government money anyway, wasn’t it? It’s a moral point to help the world for the good of us all…. Matt a colleague from the Food Bank says he is conflicted as he has stocks in J&J. I said it was their moral duty and the world needed it.

Congress has decided rightly to investigate the Jan 6th commission, but pathetically the GOP voted against it and one congressman even said there wasn’t any violence, and it was just like a tour around the capitol building. On the news it showed the same gentleman trying to block the doors from the rioters and looking terrified. Its worth watching a snippet of this speech from a frustrated Democrat, Tim Ryan. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cjc2UDgwYE

I organised having my dog walking group of ladies over and I made them a nice salad and cheese board lunch and made scones with cream and jam which they loved. We also had Pimms which went down very well. We had a lovely afternoon. One of the lovely ladies is from Iran and told us about her move through Turkey to England and how grateful she will always be to Britain for taking the family on. The rest of her family are still there but she had married an American. She told us of the terrible time the family had in Turkey at the border with corrupt guards demanding bribes and how she will never go back there,

Another lady is a Jazz singer pianist who just this year was nominated for a Grammy (...oooohhh look at me dropping that in)…. Anyway she had been on a tour of Russia and also had to endure corrupt guards there as well.

At my ceramics class I took the remaining scones in with the Pimms. They wouldn’t stop talking about them, as they’d never had either of them before and I’ve been asked to bring them in again. Vicky brought in Taiwanese’s pancakes to try at home, but as it was all in Taiwanese, I can only hope I cooked them in the right way. Vicky often brings in wonderful Asian food for us to try. There are a number of Israeli ladies in the studio and despite my very best efforts to not talk politics, they wanted to bring me into their conversation about how the news was wrong, and their Israeli news said that only military targets were hit. Later that week another lady said that a teacher in a LA school had used the conflict as part of a debate and had discussed the Palestine children being bombed out of their homes. There were discussions about how the teacher was anti-Semitic and should be sacked. I again tried to keep out of it, as I realise any disagreement on my part would also be seen as anti-Semitic, but I did say that it’s the teacher’s job to help students see both sides. It’s a weird world where if you have a different viewpoint or disagree with something, you are considered racist or anti-Semitic.

Mark’s company had bought a speaker in to do training on bullying and discrimination in the workplace- she opened with asking for people to consider and pray for anti-Asian and anti-Semitic discrimination. How bloody insensitive to anyone who is Muslim or related to Palestine (which someone was). I hope they asked for a refund!!!

I’ve finished my first level 1 course of the Art degree, and so am onto the next level 1 section. I found inspiration in my last piece by drinking a large glass of red wine…that night it looked like a masterpiece – not so much the next morning. I also went with my lovely neighbour to a cannabis dispensary. Its an odd feeling and you feel like you are entering somewhere a little edgy (a cross between a cheap motel lobby and a mafia headquarters). The entrance lobby was all grey with bench seating at the sides and after giving the tattooed lady behind a glass fronted booth our IDs, we were buzzed into a door with the words entrance in large lettering. Inside were a multitude of colourful shelves filled with every type of cannabis product you could think of, even ones for over anxious dogs. You just have to ask them for the feeling you want and they get it for you. Gummies are definitely the way to go…. I’m becoming Californian after all.

Something that made me giggle a couple of weeks ago…

“Pete Buttigieg warns motorists not to put gasoline in plastic bags as the run on fuel spreads in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline crisis.” – hilarious!

The Rick and Alan jamming is still going well every Monday evening. I am getting better but a couple of weeks ago they’d set up a microphone for me and I realised I couldn’t play standing up – I’ll have to work on that. 😊

So, we’ve moved into fire season…. as the Pacific Palisades (near Santa Monica) fire grows to 1,325 acres; More than 1,000 people are under mandatory evacuation. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse.

Today I drove to the Ceramics Studio and on that 20 minute journey, I saw a young man with his top off jogging and a lady standing by the side of the road in a bikini.

You get used to it - it’s never quiet here for sure.