Saturday Morning on My Lanai

Sunrise from My Lanai

Sorry. You'll have to wait a bit for more Wudang Revisited. Just pretend you are on the train with me, and tomorrow you will wake up at our destination. In the meantime, enjoy the sunrise from my lanai.

Until I reload MS Office I can't access my diary, and the reloading is a boring task. Too boring for the first Saturday morning I have had at home in 14 weeks (my Chinese painting class was every Saturday morning, all summer, downtown, it was like having to go to work, except I felt more compelled to be on time and of course, I really enjoyed it. Still I missed leisurely Saturday mornings.) Today feels so luxurious--well, it is Labor Day weekend, so I have this morning and two more days at home to do whatever I want to.

I have decided to paint a bit, sketching out an image, a cat regarding a goldfish in a bowl. (Sorry thise images are so small; I hope you can click on them to see the details.) At the same time I am reading a book (Henry Alford's "How to Live") and drinking wine (Red Bicyclette, a light cheap French Pinot Noir that the Wizard and I both can drink--he bought a case.)

The Yellow Emperor, model for the cat in my painting, is watching me from his throne.

Another Lanai View

The light is quite lovely today. That sort of empty space in the upper third of the picture used to be occupied by a big albizia tree that I miss very much. It presented a very pleasing horizontal aspect in contrast to the vertical eucalyptus on the slope. The tree was removed because it was a hazard; there is a driveway just below it that goes into the parking garage. Albizia are not the most stable of trees, and liability always seems to trump beauty.

The Yellow Emperor also enjoys hanging out, kind of literally, on the lanai. The view from the 10th floor appeals to him. He can look down on the birds! Once I had a cat, the late Mao Xiao Xin, a fabulous silver tabby, who on first encountering this very view, looked down, and then backed up from the railing....very slowly. To see a cat walking backward is rare. But he was a careful cat. He had a good life on this very lanai, and died at a reasonable old age peacefully under the wicker chair in the photo above.