She is a stone cold fox. It’s in these moments of power and possession that I fall all over again, it’s that first enveloping moment when I saw her knew. Just shy of ten years in now and I still have to sometimes gulp at air.

I like to be thus drunk. In all our breeding we reached concert proportions. I can’t envy Mozart after the things we’ve done. 

Can anyone tell us what these are? Found in the courtyard of one of my favorite photo galleries in LA, M+B. They’ve just finished today an amazing show of Howard L. Bingham’s photos of Ali and Forman in Zaire for the Rumble In The Jungle. Ali’s his best friend, he told me, and he’s been with him, photographing him all his life. There was this jewel of an old lady there and she told me, “I met Ali once, and I told him, ‘You really are pretty.’” And he really was. You have to look at his eyes as he stares at Forman who’s got him up again the ropes, slugging him. He’s so impassively looking at Forman’s face, like seeing a lover across the park. He was pretty.

All hail Sky Farm Red. The journals have really gotten it right. Our experiment is working, this article is the champaign cocktail raised in toast to our shared and now so beautifully realized vision. Ilse’s tireless work in the cultivation of our green space has made this place a quarter acre of Los Angeles outside of smog and cement. It’s tremendous kudos from the Angeles, eh? And for myself, I am finally beginning to see some solidity to my shared history with this city of my youth, like my tombstone could reside here one day. 

Our cockatiels Frieda and Frieda may well be lesbians. It’s well beyond us how to tell the sex of our colorful birds. But the crazy one, the one who ate her own beak off, has been in a mothering mood of late, broody with a dozen eggs under her flounced wings in their nest box. Early in the cycle both birds were taking turns sitting on them, as cockatiels do, sharing the incubation duties between mom and dad and we figured our fair Frieda must be Fredo. They’ve been together for a few years now, but the new nesting box – with just the right amount of wood shavings fill, just blow the entrance hole – finally put them to some concerted work instead of the odd aimlessly dropped spring egg at the bottom of the aviary. Now it looked like we might have a zoo of bright peepers to fill the garden with their squawk song. But after a week and some, closing in on the ten day incubation length, Fredo started shunning his duties. Frieda, with her bug eyes, was always in there, wings akimbo, hiding her brood of smooth eggs. And the next day passed and the next. We finally got in there yesterday to find that sure enough she was sitting on duds. Nature makes us all broody at times, I suppose. So sad. Our silky chickens were doing the same earlier this Spring and we just snuck a fertilized egg in under her. It worked and now we have a new chick who is swiftly gaining size on her diminutive foster mother. But the bond is there completely. Nature rarely leaves out that mother/child connection. And we’ve bonded with the chick daily and she’s very into us as well. Good scenes from the farm, and sad scenes too, as the two Frieda’s try to work out who they are and what they do.