Sam has gotten into the habit of making a new dish every weekend for both of us to eat throughout the week for lunch and/or dinner.  I certainly can’t complain about this culinary experiment as it has been filled wish spectacular results like the above beef stroganoff and the below lamb chops.

The above food photos have been in my camera for weeks, but I haven’t downloaded or updated in a while.  I stopped exhibiting at the Hive when we went to Thailand and haven’t had the time to do it since.  I’m still going to do paintings, but they’re going very slow.  I decided to try to make my own 4’x2′ cradled panels (4 of them) and that took a few weeks to put together, sand, gesso, etc.  Now I have a side project going that is also taking up a fair amount of time.  More on that in January.

In the mean time Sam and I have been up to things, just nothing I have photos of.  For example; three weeks ago Sam got VIP tickets to a fashion+art+music show at the House Of Blues.  No photography allowed.  We also went to Iris about a month ago, but, again, no photos allowed.

This weekend we finally got back into the swing of things where photography is allowed.  On Friday night we went to an opening at Copro.  This show was curated by martin wittfooth.   The art was all very high quality and so was the food.  That may not sound like a big deal, but from vast experience I can tell you that usually a gallery doesn’t have free food at an opening (but always a for-pay bar of some kind), and if they do it’s cheese cubes and crackers.  For this one the Copro broke out the good stuff. Platter after platter came out of the back with all kinds of gourmet cheeses (goat cheese is always my favorite), grapes, strawberries, an assortment of chocolate/yogurt covered pretzels and chips.

Here are some of my favorite pieces.  All can be found at Copro’s site.

In my head this next painting reminded me of  Rimbaud’s painting at the Louvre.

But after looking it up I think it is more the darkness+water+white dress that reminded me as the pose is different.

The next afternoon we set out to find Rubio Canyon waterfall/s.  The directions said the trailhead was in between two houses, and right they were.  Here is Sam standing by the trailhead which literally goes back beside the garage of the white house on the right.

After you get past the houses the trail quickly starts winding along the side of the canyon.  After a while we realized we’d missed a turn somewhere as we weren’t getting anywhere near any waterfalls but could hear water below.

We doubled back and headed down a lower path and came to a dried up creek bed.

We hiked over the rocks (all kinds of sparkly granite, etc.) until we came to the falls. These waterfalls were more like a trickle.

So we turned around and headed back down the dried up creek.  Eventually we came to this ancient dam that burst open at some point, probably when the side of the hill on the other side caved in.

At the bottom we saw another trail going up the other side of the hill and followed it about halfway to the top before turning around.

In the photo we’re on the western side of the hill and you can see downtown Los Angeles off to the left.  The photo below is zoomed in.  Rubio Canyon is in Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Valley up above Altadena, which is itself above Pasadena, so to see downtown Los Angeles at all means visibility was quit good.  Although it can’t be seen in the photos, in real life we could see the ocean, a good forty miles away.  For the folks back home that’s a little like being able to see Athens from Marietta.