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| Yes, there are country roads outside of Los Angeles if you look long enough. This blog and picture celebrate my reasons for being on one of them on May 9, 2013. |
First of all, I want to tell you more about the picture above. I drew it. It's a leaf and a country road, with "drops" of rain coming down in ink and haiku poem that states "Liglhtly falling rain - while leaving Los Angeles - on a long country road." Some of it was inspired by Prompt 6ix 19 at one of my favorite art journaling websites, daisyyellow.com. Some of it is inspired by what I did yesterday, which is seal a deal with my new businesses' fourth client. I will explain how the two tie together, and why the poem even makes sense, more towards the end.
The name of my new client is 24 Carrots, a catering company and restaurants in Irvine. (I was talking to the owner and writing for three other business owners before the business became official on Monday.)
I haven't been scrapbooking much lately. It's partly because, after I had all of my photos finished for 2012, I just hit a creative wall. It's partly because after I had all my photos finished for 2012, my wallet also hit a creative wall, and lost its ability to generate the random amounts of cash I "need" for more scrapbook supplies. It's partly because my financial situation is, or at least was, a whole lot more serious than that joke.
But for maybe the past week, I've had a happier reason. I decided at the end of April that the time had come to start Pen Porter, the business I have thought about starting for almost 10 years. So, as of May 6, my business is now official! What I do is public relations, and for the most part that means helping my clients get stories published about them in various southern California media outlets.
I won't be saying too much more about Pen Porter on this blog, most likely. This blog is about family and some of my hobbies. My business and my hobbies, especially my paper crafting hobbies, don't usually mix. There's a little more crossover between business and my love of cooking, but cooking has its own blog that I maintain even more poorly than this one.
Besides, at the end of April, I started two more blogs that are more related to my business. I started them both while in class at University of California-Riverside Extension. That's possible because my class at UCR is social media. One of the blogs is to be used for class assignments. I believe I first started the other one, and for some reason decided something had to be changed on it, which I at least at the time couldn't figure out how to change. So I started a second one, and began using it for class assignments.
But I'm really quite happy with the first one, so it has become the blog I will use to tell the world what is going on with Pen Porter. And that's the blog that will probably get most of my blogging time focus for the forseeable future.
I suppose, once class is done, I will use my other new blog to tell the world more general stuff about public relations, as that's the topic I'm an expert in. But probably only if I don't feel more like blogging about paper arts or cooking, which I'm also pretty good at too.
Which brings us back to this paper art. We had to go to Irvine to meet with the owner of 24 Carrots. We were done with the meeting at 4:30 p.m. Although you generally go places in Southern California by taking the freeways, the ones leading directly from Orange County to Riverside aren't the best place to be that close to 5 p.m. So we started out our trip in search of alternatives.
A freeway you want to avoid like death during the rush hour is California State Highway 91. It's evil! It also is the most direct way to get from Irvine to Riverside.
However, Jurupa Valley is north of Riverside. The 60 Freeway runs through Jurupa Valley, and the 91 does not. So, even for someone like me who lives at the very south end of Jurupa Valley, the 60 Freeway can be a logical alternative. We've done that more than a few times coming home from Orange County. We also frequently use this freeway to get back from Los Angeles, as it is more direct. The 60 Freeway starts in Los Angeles, so it's a straight shot to Jurupa Valley, although it too sometimes must be avoided in the Los Angeles area because of excessive traffic there. It literally is faster to take surface streets.
However, to get to the 60 Freeway from Orange County, you have to go north quite a ways. This normally can be done on Interstate 5 and the 57 Freeway, which aren't evil like the 91 Freeway. But they still aren't much fun during rush hour. Several times during our trip, we decided there was too much traffic heading in the direction of the freeway, and pressed on with roads that avoided it.
At one point (in Brea), we stopped for dinner. While we wer there a quick, but hard downpour made everything wet. You don't see too much of that this late in the year, but we've had rain several times earlier this month. I think there is a rule that it has to rain in May, but that's a whole nother story.
When we were in Brea, we were already so far north that we were on the same streets (Lambert, Brea and Brea Canyon) that we had been on less than a month ago after a trip home from Los Angeles. We had left Los Angeles at 5:15 and were supposed to be back home that night for a 7 p.m. meeting, but we were about a half hour late. It would have been worse on the 60 Freeway.
When we went from Los Angeles, we had decided to get on the 57 Freeway from one of the exits off Brea Canyon Road, then we took the 60 to Jurupa Valley. But this time, the 57 still had too much traffic, so we kept pressing on the side streets.
By the time we got to any streets we could have taken directly up to the 60, I had figured out that one of the streets turns to another street, and that street would have taken us so close to home there wasn't any point on getting on the 60 Freeway. Although the 60's traffic was probably OK, we decided to take the road anyhow.
And we are glad we did. Because after lots of driving through suburban Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, that last road on the map became a country road. With scattered farmhouses and lots and lots of cows! Having grown up on a farm, I love cows! But I don't usually expect to see them on drives home from Los Angeles, or Irvine!
And so, I came home thinking about the rain, the cows, and how the road we were on is also a way home from the second largest city in the United States. We had made it all the way home from Irvine without touching the freeways, and could have done the same from Los Angeles. That's something to celebrate in itself, and so I made art to do exactly that.
