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I'm about to take the dog for a walk.

What's odd is that I've lived here for about 15 years, and never knew half of what was out there. Yesterday the two of us met a dozen huge wild turkeys, back by the beehives, and they ran or flew off into the trees grumbling and cackling. The day before that we encountered a mole -- "the little gentleman in the velvet jacket" as the Jacobites used to toast him -- with huge paws scrabbling velvetly through the leaf-mould, and I pulled out my phone and filmed him for a few seconds. I've seen fireflies and fireworks, discovered skeletons and mushrooms and all manner of interesting plants. I learned what walnuts smell like when they're still on the tree (a strange mixture of citrus and carpentry). I've met grouse and rabbits (Cabal chases rabbits unsuccessfully when he spots them. Sometimes he doesn't spot them. Several times I've been convinced that he had actually spotted them and was pretending not to because he wasn't sure what he'd do if ever he caught one) (He has no such compunction about chasing cats. Yesterday he shot off after poor Fred, who went straight up a tree where he relaxed and was superior). I've seen some amazing wildflowers too.

I should post some photos of him here. When we got him, he had a grey ruff around his neck, from three years of being chained up. These days he's just white all over, so much so that someone who had seen him at the beginning wanted to know if we were bleaching him. He still looks a bit like a wolf. He barks a bit, which he never used to do, to let us know that people are at the door. And he doesn't know why I'm sitting and typing when I could be off wandering the trails at the back of the house, the ones that used to be completely overgrown and forgotten. The ones I never used to walk at all.

The promotional world for Stardust is starting, which has a nervous author convinced that no-one in the world is going to know about the movie or that it's good starting to breathe a sigh of relief. There are free screenings starting to get the word out, and according to Google news, if you buy stuff at French Connection you can get free tickets...
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-shoptalk0713,0,2458209.column?coll=ny-entertainment-promo


And I got a phone picture from my friend Kelli Bickman in New York letting me know that new posters have been spotted in Manhattan. They take some elements from the original poster and rearrange them...

(And Kelli says -- Neil.. S.O.S. i've recently fallen prey to a real-estate con-artist who is trying to steal my rent stabilized apartment/studio of 12 years and I don't have the resources to fight the court battle. Is there anyone out there who can help find me a pro bono real estate attorney in Manhattan (or will barter art)? or if there is anyone out there who has considered buying my work or commissioning a painting but hasn't gone the distance, now is a Very Good Time. Help me save my home and squash this con artist. A court date has been set for July 23. Thank you ten billion times for your help. kelli bickman - www.kellibickman.net I've known Kelli for about 15 years, she's a great artist and a very nice, kind person, so I'm happy to post this. Any New York lawyers who like art out there?)

Anyway, here's the International version of the original poster, which is a bit more golden than the US version.

I just realized this morning that the weekend Stardust opens is also the weekend of the Perseids meteor shower, one of the most active times for "shooting stars" of the year; so it wouldn't be unheard of at all for people to see the movie, walk out of the theater, and actually see a shooting star themselves.

Was the opening planned that way (if it was, this is an incredibly cool bit of marketing that I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned yet), or was this just an amazing coincidence?

It's an amazing coincidence. But now I've told people, maybe it'll be a key wossname in the marketing strategy, in those parts of America where you can still see the stars.

...

It's all animal world here at the house. The last two cats came home from my assistant Lorraine's (she got a jungle kitten and decided she had too many cats in too small a house), while Fred the Unlucky Black Cat, who had vanished for several weeks, reappeared last night slightly the worse for wear -- he had an injury on his thigh that smelled like rancid cheese, which I washed with peroxide, and a new scar on his forehead, and he's now in the basement recovering and appreciating not being outside any longer. He now goes floppy whenever he gets picked up. I've gone from two and a half cats (the half being Fred outside in the garage) to six cats in a couple of weeks.

Fred's garage, which has a magnetic lock on the cat door, so only he can get in, has recently been invaded (which may be why he'd vanished, and also why he'd a new leg injury). Birdseed was scattered everywhere. So the Birdchick set up a camera to find out who could be doing it, and how.

The conclusion -- not entirely unexpected -- is that a magnetically locked cat door is no obstacle to a family of determined raccoons...

(Overexposed photo tweaked by Bill Stiteler.)

I don't have any new sketches or paintings to post this week, but we did go hiking this weekend, so I guess I'll post that. I really could just blog about hiking, given how much of it we've been doing these days. On Sunday, we drove over to Arroyo Sequit in Malibu. We took Westlake Blvd. for a good part of the drive which unbeknownst to us was a long series of hair-pin turns and certainly not for the weak of stomach.

Signs at the beginning of the trail warned of this being mountain lion country. We didn't see any mountain lions, but we did see a lot of speckled lizards and one horned toad. The trail itself was pretty short, about a mile and a half plus a brief detour.

It was so quiet there. You could hear the wind blowing through the pines - one of my favorite sounds, reminiscent of my childhood.

The trail afforded lots of great, sweeping views of the valley and mountains in the distant, as well as some huge satellite dishes. The detour close to the end of the trail led us to a paved which actually went right up to the dishes, which appeared to be the property of AT&T. It's always so strange to be surrounded by nature and then stumble across something very much man-made and very high-tech - seems so out of place.

Another odd aspect to hiking in LA is that we live in this incredibly dense, heavily paved urban jungle, but if we drive for twenty minutes or so, we're suddenly in the middle of nowhere. Driving through the mountains really feels like back-country where there might be a pocket of houses or a small town, but mostly wilderness. I can almost forget that I'm really right, smack in the middle of one of the country's largest cities. It really is quite strange when you think about it.

We were planning on doing a much longer hike at Chesebro Canyon on Monday, but we decided to get into a car accident instead. It really was unfortunate - we were barely two blocks from our home when we all stopped short just past an intersection and ended up in a three-car pile-up. We were the sandwich car and took the most damage. We'll probably have to replace 'Sophia.' My husband is sad - she's been a good car for a very long time. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. We were all walking around, talking coherently right afterward, although we were all badly shaken up. We both woke up feeling really sore today. Hopefully, we'll feel better soon and get the lack-of-car situation figured out this weekend. Dreading car-shopping...

I guess I should try to get some painting done today so I actually have some art to post next time!