Guava, persimmon, pomegranate, all in a row. How I love autumn in LA.

More fall.

It’s amazing really, how something handmade can instantly trump the tallest towers.

How seeing the evidence of someone’s hard work makes you want to stop and stare.

And the little imperfections make these contributions far more interesting than anything else on the block.

It’s the same feeling you get when you see a natural phenomenon that triumphs over a man-made spectacle.

Or when nature and humans work closely together.

Which we really should do more often.

More photos from the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship.

Okay, okay, so it was 85 today. But there were Santa Ana winds, somewhere. And I swear I saw a few yellow leaves on the street, maybe. So autumn must be right around the corner, right? Right?

Perhaps to nudge the cold weather our way, we made soup tonight. Butternut squash sweet potato Granny Smith apple soup.* With a cozy maple cinnamon yogurt on top. And the salad? A that’s a fall Waldorf. A Falldorf.

I’m trying to be seasonal here, people.

*Here’s how I make my vegetarian no-dairy soups.

I know what you’re thinking: Forget gelato, Los Angeles, walking. What this blog needs is more photos of trees! And I agree! Being the fall-deprived Angeleno that I am, I went all the way to Crested Butte, Colorado to snap shots of the aspens in color. Except when I got there, the leaves were pretty much all gone.

What leaves hadn’t left weren’t exactly the golden yellow hearts you see fluttering through those John Denver lyrics. A wet autumn had rendered them more like a pale chartreuse.

Luckily, there was plenty more color to find in town.

From the houses.

To the recreational equipment.

Even the bikes are colorful in Crested Butte.

And sometimes… stuffed.

It seemed like some people in Crested Butte were fed up with the trees losing their leaves, and carved them into seasonal lawn ornaments instead.

Or porch decor.

Really, who needs trees, anyway? Certainly not the Continental Divide.

More photos of Crested Butte.

Last week my friend Liz and I slipped away to the gorgeous Enchantment Resort in Sedona for less than 24 hours of much-needed R&R.

We got up early the next morning and took a hike through Boynton Canyon, the steep tangerine walls that hug the property.

It was a pretty enough walk, with the canyon around us just beginning to glow.

But after walking through a still-mostly-green forest, suddenly we rounded a corner, and the trees started to match the rocks.

We don’t know if it was the minerals in the soil or maybe the pull of the vortex that supposedly pumps energy into the canyon, but in this little grove of trees there were some of the most beautiful fall colors we’d ever seen.

There were a whole range of hues that seemed to be pre-approved by the Sedona board of tourism.

But the hot pink leaves were the highlight.

The leaves were so bright, it was like standing underneath a stained glass window.

I tell you: I have never seen such vibrant color.

And with a few more steps it was gone. Back to the green, green forest.

After soaking up all that color there was only one thing to order at breakfast—the bright magenta prickly pear juice, of course.

More photos from Sedona.

I’ll go ahead and apologize ahead of time to those of you suffering from a late-summer heatwave, the aftermath of Irene, early morning drizzle. This is going to be a story about what everyone says doesn’t exist in LA: weather.

When I moved to LA it was right around this time of year, and summer felt like what summer felt like in most of the places I’d lived (minus the brain-buckling humidity in Atlanta and St. Louis, of course). But I soon realized the weather in my new city would be different. During the first weekend in November I was baking my famous pumpkin bars when I heard a mysterious tapping sound in the kitchen. I crouched on the floor to check the oven’s pilot light, peered into the dusty depths of the cabinets, trying to locate it. Then I happened to glance outside. It was raining. It hadn’t rained the entire three months I had been there. LA had made me completely forget about the concept of rain.

I don’t remember caring much about barometric pressure or dew point before I moved here, but at that moment, I found myself suddenly fascinated with this alien climate. What kind of place did I live in where it never rained from July to November? Perhaps in some way of coping with its absence, since then I have become interested—nay, obsessed! with weather.

In fact, I would love to engage in a conversation with you at any time about torrential rain, freezing temperatures, record heat, the chance of snow. I would be happy to explain the science behind the annual phenomenon of June Gloom (or May Gray, or No Sky July, or Fogust). I could go on and on about LA’s microclimates: how Santa Monica will still be freezing when Silver Lake is muggy, how the 405 draws a fog line along the coast and the 210 can mean the difference between snow and rain. Forget politics, movies, breaking news: I want to talk about 40-to-50-mile-an-hour wind gusts on the Grapevine!

What do I look at first every day when I get up? No, not Twitter. Not Facebook. I go over to the National Weather Service/National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration official forecast page:

If you casually ask me about the weather later today, I’ll tell you it will be slightly cooler, high of 80, with unseasonable fog clearing before noon. I will also tell you that we’ve had a fairly normal month temperature- and precipitation-wise. But then you should be prepared to get an earful from me about the high surf advisory in effect today. It’s a big swell, all the way from New Zealand. Some of the southern-facing beaches will see sets of up to 11 feet! EXCITING!

You could give me a daily pop quiz on LA’s forecast.

Because of my encyclopedic knowledge of LA weather, I can tell you that statistically, yes, it is mostly sunny, blue sky, slight breeze, 72 degrees. We only get, on the average, 35 days of precipitation a year. But the longer I’ve lived here, the longer I’ve spent poring over historical data, the more I yearn to experience the slight—if not seasonal—nuances in LA’s climate.

If you tell me we don’t have seasons the first thing I will show you is my collection of photos featuring LA cloaked in snow. Then I will tell you that the last substantial snowfall we got was in 1949 when it snowed for three days. There was a dusting of snow in Malibu in 2007, and another interesting incident last winter, the day it “graupeled” in the Valley. This was easily one of the worst days of my life. As people posted photos of their yards covered in white possibly-still-frozen pellets, I sat in beautiful Palm Springs and moaned about missing it. “We could have taken the Red Line to snow,” I murmured to no one, burying my face in Instagram photos, trying to imagine Burbank as a winter wonderland.

And don’t say we don’t have extremes. The day that it hit 113 last summer (fall, actually, it was September 27), shattering LA’s records (and breaking the thermometer at USC), I was panting at my computer, trying to get work done but I was so distracted by the historic highs I could hardly type a word. I kept running to update Keith (who had smartly retreated into its cool shade of the garage to paint) on the situation. It’s 105! It’s 110! It’s breaking all the records! But that wasn’t all. A September of record-breaking heat had come on the heels of an exceptionally cold and gloomy summer. We had survived both the hottest and the coldest summer on record. I talked about this FOR WEEKS.

So my point is not that LA is weather-agnostic. But living in LA has made me appreciate weather so much more. I dive for my camera when I start to smell a thunderstorm. When I wake up to fog I pray for an entirely cloudy day. High winds? I’m going for a run. My eyes glitter when I hear “frost advisory.” Just the chance of weather is enough to make another cloudless day in LA special.

Do you savor our sunny days or miss having seasons?

I’m celebrating ten years in LA with ten days of LA stories. Go here for more LAX.

So we thought we’d grow some tomatoes this year. We bought a few varieties and stuck them in our planter box that we built last spring. But things didn’t go as planned. The plants either didn’t like the hot sun or the competition; they were scraggly and weak. So I dug them up and tossed them in a forgotten corner of the garden with a heap of compost. I threw an extra tomato cage on top. And pretty much forgot about them.

About a month later, I only really noticed what had happened when I saw a few of these little guys peeking through the fence. I walked around the corner (seriously, it’s a place I rarely go) and was confronted with a tomato plant that was as tall as my head.

Here’s what it looks like today, a little over a month later.

I spent the morning tying the vines up to random parts of the fence, hoping that the weight of the fist-sized green tomatoes wouldn’t snap the delicate stems. As I was untangling the mess of leaves, I realized that this whole tomato forest was only originating from two plants. One of which isn’t even abnormally big. The other one, I’m pretty sure, is the General Sherman of tomatoes.

Maybe it’s the slight shade from being behind the fence; maybe it’s how this little patch of soil manages to conserve water. But I’ve never experienced tomato plants like this. Each week, we get a dozen fruits. And with their light-red, super sweet, slightly pointed globes, I’m almost 90% sure they’re Japanese tomatoes.

But here’s the thing. We didn’t buy any Japanese tomatoes.

All the varieties we bought were colorful heirlooms. But we sure do eat a lot of Japanese tomatoes. Meaning that this freak of nature, this organic monstrosity, this Audrey Two of the nightshade family? Yep, it was most likely a survivor from the compost bin.

And you know what else this means? It’s going to be a great month for making my famous tomato pie.

More photos from the garden.

I didn’t really understand until I saw them myself. But I would say that seeing the sequoia trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is one of those things that everyone needs to do.

Imagine this. You stand in a place called the Giant Forest, surrounded by seven of the 15 largest trees on the planet. The rest of them? Just a short drive away.

Here you have the General Sherman Tree. The most massive living thing on earth. And one of the widest trees on the planet. But not the widest.

Because the widest is General Grant.

It felt impossible to capture the scale of these trees in a single photo.

At 2000 years old, they had all suffered some kind of damage. They were split with fire scars and asymmetrical with missing limbs.

They had huge rumpled trunks that almost looked like they were buckling under their own weight.

And were surprisingly fuzzy, like massive Snuffleupagus legs marching through the forest.

In short, a sequoia is maybe one of the most awe-inducing things you’ll ever see.

But throughout the park, there were far too many places that looked like this.

They would cut trees down just to take slices back home to prove to the East Coasters that such trees existed. (And they still didn’t believe them.)

As we hiked through the forests littered with wooden graves and plundered timber, it started to feel like the park existed for the sole purpose of teaching us a lesson. People: Think about what you’re doing! But why did the logging stop all of a sudden? Who could have possibly helped the country to come to its senses?

On a hike one morning by myself, I came across the answer.

A writer.

Let’s just say that’s given me plenty to think about as I’ve come home and gotten back to work.

More photos of Sequoia.

Is there anything better than the summertime flora of Los Angeles? Spotted on a chain-link fence in Hollywood. Yes, passion fruit grows wild on the streets of LA.

More Street Walker photos.

My mom’s in town for a few days so we took a walk around the neighborhood to visit some of my favorite spots. (Don’t worry, mine is 100% dairy-free sorbet… and it was good!)

It’s funny to walk through a place you know well with someone from out of town—you start to see the same old street through new eyes. Stuff you pass every day suddenly becomes novel.

The stores you’ve been in a million times are filled with brilliant new products. And maybe the best pillows you’ve ever seen.

The little things you took for granted suddenly appear brighter, more alive.

And the tiniest details reveal themselves—if you take the time to look.

You start to see all the incredible possibilities for even the most mundane, everyday objects.

I recommend taking a walk in your neighborhood with an out-of-towner as soon as possible.