There is something sweet and rather interesting about having a new person in the house, especially when that new person is a particularly elegant old man. Pepper is an awfully nice chap, a decent type of dog. He is willowy and whitening around the muzzle, kind and dear, but he has sore hips and his hind legs don't work as well as they used to. He's madly in love with Bean, the younger, and lesser spotted, and somewhat wary of Dotsie, the policeman of the house.
He conducts himself with great aplomb, only having to be told once that he may not lay on the human sofas, but that there are two dog sofas to which he is more than welcome (this has to be extremely complicated for the canine brain, but he has learned, quite deftly, which is which and adheres to the rule). He is finally eating his food after a week of trying various combinations of kibble and wet food, metal bowls and his own favorite Lakers purple and yellow bowl, and placement. In his former life, his food was put down and left all day, so for 9 years he's been on the grazing menu. One can imagine that this must be quite a change.
As I was making my Shepherd's pie for our book club supper last night, I started to nibble thoughtfully on a celery stick and realized with quite an epiphany what a maligned and ignored vegetable the poor celery is. All due credit to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who said, famously, "Celery is a bit like a gym membership." The crunch is the thing, isn't it? It's the minxy little crunch that gets you every time.
It would seem churlish to complain about the cold in Los Angeles, when all my English friends are under six feet of snow, but the canyon has been cold, nonetheless, with temperatures down to 20F at night. My mother braved it very well in her little hut (my office transforms quite magically into a guest bedroom) with the sturdy space heater, and I found her there every morning, when I brought tea, looking cozy in bed with Antonia Fraser's memoir propped up on her lap.
There are apples from a tree in Laurel Canyon that sit in a bowl on my hall table. The bowl, with its pie-crust edge comes from Rhinebeck, NY and reminds me of my son who's at school near there. The apples were pilfered by Miss Monica who defied the laws of gravity, heaving herself over the iron fence to find the tree in the grounds of the Houdini mansion, hidden by old rock walls that line this part of the canyon, white lilies and cactus. 
My daughter is learning to drive and I'm experiencing the sensation of whizzing around familiar corners at unfamiliar angles. And I'm trying very hard not to grip the side of the door or jump away from the curb as we get a little close, but as much as one tries not to become one's parents, the traces leak through.