My Garden

Thought I'd share some pictures of our garden with you.










So far we have one lone tomato growing. There are a few flowers on one of the other plants, so I still have hope we'll get some more.

There are 4 green peppers growing right now and 3 more flowers. I hope that whatever is eating the leaves doesn't eat the peppers.

And lastly, there's the basil, which is growing quite nicely and apparently keeping some bugs well fed as I can hardly find any uneaten leaves...

So, does anyone have any suggestions for a non chemical/pesticide way to rid my plants of the bugs?

Just a few pictures

This is a picture of the Hollywood sign taken during our drive to church. We've been attending the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church.




Here is a photograph of a fruit vendor. When you drive through LA you see quite a few of these. They seem to be a healthy alternative to the Hot Dog vendors of TO.








And now, for something completely unrelated, pictures of cats with bad English.

The Getty Museum

Chantal has been here in California for a while. On Tuesday, we went to the Getty Museum here in Los Angeles. It's situated on top of two hills and you have to take a little train up to the top.

We took two tours while there: one showing the museums best pieces and the other explaining the architecture.

This is a picture of one of the buildings from the garden. The trees below are in a perfect line. If you stand directly in front of them it looks as if there is only one tree.











Above is a wood carving of a monk that was painted to look real. Below are a couple pictures of the garden. The bougainvillea trees are created using rebar frames that work as a lattice for the plants to climb.

We made it...

Well, we made it back to LA. There are two of us, two carry on bags and oh, wait... only ONE checked bag.

Back in Toronto we had made sure to check in 2 hours early, like you're supposed to for international flights. We checked our bags, passed through security, went to our gate and waited to leave. The previous flight was late arriving so we were a bit late leaving. I think we took off about 15 minutes after we were supposed to and we had to fly around some thunderstorms, so we arrived at our stop over in Salt Lake City 20 minutes later than we were supposed to. The delay meant that we only had 25 minutes from the time we arrived to the time our next flight left. Luckily the gates were right beside each other, so we had plenty of time, but I was a bit worried about our bags.

We arrived in LA on time at 8:32pm, went down to the baggage claim area and proceeded to stand there for about 30 minutes waiting for our baggage information to come up on the board. It never did. We eventually went to the Delta baggage help desk and asked them where our bags were. They directed us to the correct carousel, where one of our bags was going round and round, but we didn't see the other one. We thought it might still be coming, so we sat down to wait for a little while, until the carousel stopped moving.

We went back to the baggage claim and told them Tim's bag didn't come. She scanned our claim tag and informed us that the bag had made it on the plane in Toronto, and that it had also made the connecting flight in Salt Lake City. So, where did our bag go awry? Well, the people at LAX decided that our bag should next go to Guatemala, despite the rather large tag that says LAX in big bold letters. Genius. The baggage claim lady tells us the flight hasn't left yet, she'll see if they can get it out of the plane, things will probably get stolen if it ends up in Guatemala. "I never check any bags, myself" she told us. Great.

We finally left the baggage claim office about an hour and a half after we arrived. We were about to get on a shuttle to our car when we realize that they hadn't given back our baggage claim stubs. So, we go back into the office and get our stubs. While in there another family comes in looking for their lost bag. They received a phone message saying that it had finally arrived... 14 days after they did and with some of the contents missing. Things were not looking good.

So, the next morning Tim looked up the status of his bag online, and noticed that they had our address entered wrong. So, we call to change the address and also end up fixing the phone number, which they have wrong too. The lady on the phone also checked the status of the bag and tells us it arrived at LAX at 10:30pm last night and that they will ship it here. It makes no sense for the bag to have arrived at 10:30 when they had told us that it was on our plane and very nearly loaded onto another plane well before 10:30.

After 24 hours we are eligible for up to $25 reimbursement for any essentials we had to buy in the meantime. Oh, but only if you're not at home (which we were) and even then the reimbursement check would only be mailed to your home so if we had been eligible for it we wouldn't receive it until well after we would have needed it. It's like they plan to lose or damage your luggage from the start. They even post signs that say that if your bag is damaged it's because you didn't buy durable enough baggage.

[UPDATE by Tim]
So around 9:00pm the following day I get a phone call from the delivery guy saying he has my bag and he'll meet me outside. I'm expecting UPS or FedEx or even just an official truck from the airport. Nope. It's some dude in a pick up truck (STUFFED to overflowing with bags they've ineptly misplaced) and he's parked literally in the middle of the road so that I have to brave traffic to approach him and exchange my signature for my bag.

My first shake in LA (sorry you missed it Linds)

Something moved 30 miles away and 3 miles underground and it shook our apartment last night at 1am. The earthquake was a 4.5 at the epicenter (about a 3.0 in LA) which is strong enough to clearly NOT be just a fleet of big trucks driving by, and besides, we're not next to any major streets. It kind of felt like the whole apartment was driving like a car. It had the small fast vibrations like a rumbling engine, plus the somewhat bigger bounces and sways of the road. It wasn't that strong though. It didn't like tip stuff over or shake stuff off of the counter or anything. It wasn't all that dramatic, but it was clearly a case of things that shouldn't be moving, doing just that. Maybe it was just God saying, "stop playing with your new camera and go to sleep, you idiot." So anyway, that's what I did.