Life Style & Travel

UNITED STATES—Urban homes are innately close to other urban homes. Newer homes are even closer to each other than older homes are, and are more imposing. Establishing or maintaining privacy can be a challenge, especially for high windows in narrow spaces. Even though home builders prefer to place windows strategically, some windows invariably face into neighboring windows or gardens. Trellised...

UNITED STATES—Most plants would prefer the real thing; how they do it in the wild. They drop their leaves, flowers and twigs. Deciduous plants do it mostly in autumn. Evergreens might spread it out through the year. The debris accumulates on the ground below, and decomposes at about the same rate as it accumulates. There is no one there...

UNITED STATES—I caught the travel bug. Some friends were going to India, to Prague, to Bali. One had seen Pink Floyd perform the rock opera “The Wall” at the Berlin Wall. Why was it that nobody was going to Abuquerque? Well, I bought tickets at a travel agency on Wilshire—testimony to the fact that I was really making money now....

UNITED STATES—Just like anything else that gets planted in the garden, new perennials seem to be so cute and innocent. They get even better as they mature. Some grow and spread to impressive proportions. Then...some perennials get to be too large. Some get overgrown enough to obscure their own appealing characteristics or other plants. Others get crowded enough to...

UNITED STATES—On a Tuesday night in July 1990, I finally met with Larry Karaszewski, a screenwriter I knew from USC. We had a lot fun in Drew Caspar's American cinema class, and thanks to Larry I wrote my first parodies for a publication called “Deep Focus” that was published by a group sitting around a table at the end...

UNITED STATES—Plants can inhabit nearly every climate on Earth. They live in hot and dry deserts, cold arctic regions, rainforests and just about everywhere in between. Plants seem to have it all figured out. Some even know how to live in our homes as houseplants, although they probably did not plan it that way. Most houseplants are tropical plants...

SAN FRANCISCO—A new company is helping to improve the travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles. SleepBus is offering rides from San Francisco to Los Angeles for $48 for a one-way trip. SleepBus’s founder and CEO Tom Currier spoke with Inc. Magazine and told them in an interview that, “It would basically be like you teleported to L.A. It would be cool." According...

UNITED STATES—In the weeks after the play’s successful run (one satisfying performance celebrated to the hilt), I showed rooms out and distributed three-day notices. “The agony,” I noted in my journal. The ecstasy was handing old good tenants, like Pedro and Tava at Estrella Avenue who were moving on and out and hopefully up, their deposit refund check. The weeks...

UNITED STATES—Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that no one owns a cat. They do whatever they want to do, whenever and however they want to do it. They take orders from no one. If they decide to use a dry spot in the garden as their litterbox, or a tree trunk as their scratching post, it...

UNITED STATES—The apple red Subaru wagon with Nevada plates that expanded my world—there was the court circus, dunning tenants, showing rooms and it made possible taking part in “Maxtla,” a stage play of a doomed prehispanic King, pre-Cortez, pre-Spanish—even though it was presented in Spanishby the Bohemia Theater Group. To a great extend the group WAS Marta Esther Main,...