lithops, light, and land-folks

have spent a few scattered days here, trying to develop some sort of routine to keep my mind and body occupied. i forget how much time school leaves free, especially this fuzzy limbo before classes commence properly. the room is now set up, or at least the important bits. behold the new digs.

getting used to living with strangers is definitely a shift in the old social transmission, but i'm doing my best to avoid annoying them right off the bat. we'll see.

as it turns out there's a xeric plant shop right up the street from my house which sells all sorts of amazing little cacti, succulents, and LITHOPS! here's the new one i picked up (lesliei albinica) along with three aloe vera plants that someday i hope to expand into a full fledged aloe vera farm and produce only the richest, freshest, most select aloe vera juice there is. aloe will cure what ails you!

in other news my landscape architecture departmental orientation was today. i got to meet all of my professors and all 13 of my cohorts in the 3 year MLA program. the professors are all a crack up. ranging from 'chip' sullivan who appeared grumbling in the corner, wearing a faded military jacket and black beret scribbling madly with a fountain pen and who is producing the first ever graphic history of landscape architecture in comic book format... to Dr. Bosselmann, a severely, sharply disheveled older gentlemen with an impressively vague European accent who travels throughout the world discoursing with academic ambivalence about all the "-bilities"... liva, walka, memora, etc.

my fellow students and i were all nervous as could be, but everyone got along nicely and we found those small world connections that make new acquaintances feel like an extension of our old life-web. i think we all recognize that chance has put us together and now we're to spend the next three year working closely together... so may as well make the best of it. politics will undoubtedly come into play sooner or later and who wants the crummy studio desk?

ooo... the fog is rolling in over the east hills. wild redwood canyons up there full of ferns and waterfalls. scrubby mediterranean plain down here; jade hedges, aloe trees, and eucalyptus groves. strange scents and new pollen making my nose run.