Mono Monday : : Alien

Sometimes I think just about everything in our garden looks like an alien life form. Some of the most notable  include: spikey plants (agaves, palms and pointy plants with no known name) and weird flower forms (grevilleas, proteas, passiflora and streletzia to name a few). However, I chose this cactus, which began as one paddle carelessly stuck into the ground because I thought the late afternoon sun created some interesting shadows which looked better in mono than they did in color. Getting close enough to it on the hill to take the picture I wanted was a challenge in itself....

On the way to see Kathy this morning I was going to take some pictures of the alien landscapes in the Fountaingrove area where 1,500 housed burned last year,  but OilMan elected to stay home and dig in the dirt, so I was driving. They have finally fixed the melted water mains which were leaking benzine into the water and preventing people from being able to get permits to rebuild. There are more houses under construction each week, although a lot of it still looks like a moonscape. I hope that people who rebuild up there have a better vision for replacing all the enormous, out of place, pseudo-Tuscan style homes that burned down. I read one story about a man who was building his entire house out of concrete and steel.

We made a deposit on a lot in Fountaingrove many years ago, when large parts were still undeveloped. We were told that there would have to be a fire engine turnaround on the lot since it was at the end of a cul-de-sac with only one other lot on it. It had a beautiful view, but once we saw where the turnaround would be and how much space it would occupy (most of the buildable part of the lot) we decided not to go there. The people who bought the other lot bought the land we were looking at and never built a house there.   The house above it and the one house on the cul-de-sac both burned down, and I always thought it rather an irony that the need for a fire engine turnaround is what prevented us from building a house that would almost certainly have burned down had we built there. Even more ironically, the brand new fire station nearby that had only been open for two months also burned down....

I'm pleased to say that Kathy has finally begun to feel like she is going to make it (her words). She's had a very rough time....