And you thought Monday Cookies had disappeared? Not a chance. I may not bake and decorate that often but I can’t stay out of the kitchen. I just can’t. When I first saw Linda Davick’s illustration of this blue-haired girl with red eyeglasses, I swooned. I fell in love with her immediately. She was so [...]
Hello, again. If I don’t look familar to you, I’ll remind you: the name’s Patch. The last time I was here, Mari stuffed me into some multicolor jacket that made me look more like Liberace’s son than the class act cat that I truly am. Well, that was tame compared to what she did to [...]
It continues to remain super hot here in Southern California. I’m not heat tolerant. Never have been. So why do I live in Southern California, where summer usually starts in June and goes on through the end of October? Sometimes I ask myself how this all happened. Sometimes, on days like this, when the mercury [...]
I was saddened to hear of Walter Cronkite’s death. Though I never saw live the broadcasts he anchored following the Kennedy assassination, or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic walk on the moon, I eventually studied his work and grew to admire him. He clearly loved being [...]
We had some major tree-chopping and trimming done over the weekend. The oleander that runs along the west side of the house had grown out of control - nearly 15 feet tall! - and blocked the living room windows to the point where the room felt like a dungeon. I had the gardeners chop them [...]
One of my favorite sections of the New York Times is the Science section. Maybe it’s the geek in me, maybe it’s the fact that I nearly flunked science and biology classes in high school and how I want somehow to understand science better, maybe it’s just that I’m weird. I don’t know. But when [...]
This is actually an oldie but goodie of mine (circa early 2007). I had just read a report about how frogs in parts of Costa Rica’s rain forest were dying off in alarming numbers, a sign that scientists said was concrete proof of global warming. When amphibians start to disappear in large numbers, it usually [...]
Several people emailed me after Thursday’s post, asking, “Where’s Wolf’s cake?”
Well…I had all sorts of plans. I wanted to make a massive cone-shaped cake with colorful, whimsical and mischievous designs all over it. But I had a deadline to meet. Not just in this economy but in my unpredictable line of work, paid work has [...]
Well hello there. The name’s Patch. You can call me Mr. Patch. I usually don’t sit for portraits because I’m far too busy for such trivial pursuits. But my master - I’ll call him Master G - apparently sent a photo of me in one of my lazier moments to Mari, and look what she [...]
We’ve got a little meyer lemon tree in our back yard that struggles to pop fruit. It’s poorly placed at the very edge of the property where larger, bushier trees block the sunlight it needs to grow. So far this year, it popped about five lemons, all of which were, for a scrawny little citrus [...]