Great Cloud Weather

It's great cloud weather with gusty winds and some rain for the past couple of days. It's hard to remember that one year ago, today was Mom's 90th birthday party. We had a great time then and we had a great time this year celebrating her birthday on March 7th. Of course, our lovely friends (also known as Everything for a Party! Group) started celebrating on my birthday a week earlier. I am partied out! And extremely grateful to know these wonderful people.

Speaking of clouds, here are some of my favorite pictures from today.

These flowers are from a couple of days ago, at the perimeter of a golf course. I like the clouds here too.

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We went early on Thursday to see the first Desert X installation in Palm Springs. Today was the actual opening of the 12 installations. Here's the first.

It was created by artist Nicholas Galanin, who is from Alaska and has Tlingit a,nd Unangax̂ ancestry. "Historically, Hollywood was a real estate advertisement for white, rural communities and this work engages that history in a lot of ways," Galanin said in a phone interview with The Desert Sun earlier this week.

On our way, we passed by the windmill farm ...

There was a lot of sand blowing in the wind!

Today, Friday (3/12) was the official opening of Desert X. We went to Palm Desert to see

It was quite an uphill hike for me on the rocky desert sand -- at least a quarter mile one way.

When you get closer, it looks like a bunch of rugs and blankets stacked up.

Here's a closer look.

And now you can see that the white stuff (it looked like a plastic batting) was sprayed with the sand-like material. There was a bit of glitter in the spray which sparkled in the sunlight.

I have to confess that I wimped out and stayed in the car for the next one. LeeAnne climbed for over 20 minutes one way, at times straight up and the installation wasn't finished. She described it as black poles almost like a jungle gym and they were affixing what looked like big marble blocks to it. Sorry, I'm too lazy to find out what it might be called.

Next was Wishing Well (LeeAnne's favorite so far).

The structure is a patchwork of plastic cooking oil containers which are used to haul water in Ghana, the artist's home country. Each patch is held by metal "stitches." He was making a statement about water insecurity there and here. Some locals in Coachella were not amused and refused space. Finally, it was sited in North Palm Springs in a public park. 

Below is the artist being interviewed.

Then we wandered around looking for the next Desert X installation. We found this:

It turns out, it was just grafitti -- we never found the real thing. 

The wind came up again.

We were, however, right near the Palm Springs Babies.

The red zig zag line has been added since I first saw the installation two years ago. It represents a fault line made by earthquakes.

The blue rods you see at the bottom of the picture above are "security" in case you climb up with wrought iron gates. I stuck my phone through the bars, almost dropping it into the pit.

The babies are still creepy in my opinion.

Another addition is our national poet laureate, Amanda Gorman.

Also nearby was NorthFace by Gucci, a Desert X sponsor.

I have been working bit by bit on Sweet Watermelon Dreams, a summer quilt using the wonderful fabric LeeAnne gave me for my birthday. I had to do a bunch of stitch ripping since when I finished it the first time, there were 4 red squares on one side. Ugh. It's better now!

And Hey Diddle Diddle has been finished and sold. That's Mom holding it up for its portrait.

That's it for now. Today is Saturday and LeeAnne and I "did" more Desert X today. So there are a lot more photos, but I'm too tired. We plan on seeing more tomorrow. So I probably will combine the two days into another blog post.

Stay tuned and be happy!