Olvera Street - China Town - Santa Monica Pier - Griffith Observatory

Welcome to Olvera Street, Los Angeles, CA Olvera Street is the birthplace of the City of Los Angeles, otherwise known as El Pueblo Historic Monument.


Our Lady of Guadalupe.


Gee they have these eggs that hold confetti - of course the GS got some. And he was going to spread it on me. I thought he saw every one breaking them BEFORE they put it on them, but he didn't. He used my head as an egg cracker! OUCH!



CHINA TOWN:





SANTA MONICA PIER: A little over cast that day, but nice and cool. We walked the pier.

I don't know what the group of us was looking at!



A man was fishing and had found a crab and had the GS hold it. Of course - first a little lesson on how to hold one and not get bit.



Going to Griffith Observatory - each letter is 50 feet high.



They had all sorts of displays.



Here we are resting, my sister and her sweet husband.



"There is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." ~ Ernest Hemingway



Happy Birthday to Ernest Hemingway - wikipedia

What is amazing is this - he lived one of the fullest lives I've seen in my readings, yet . . . he committed suicide.

In the spring of 1961, three months after his initial treatment at the Mayo clinic where he received a series of ECT treatment, Hemingway attempted suicide in his Sun Valley home. His wife Mary convinced the local physician, Dr. Saviers, to hospitalize Hemingway at Sun Valley hospital and from there he returned to the Mayo clinic where he was "given ten more shock treatments."

On the morning of July 2, 1961, two days after having been released from the Mayo clinic, Hemingway unlocked the gun cabinet, went to the front entrance of their Sun Valley house, and "pushed two shells into the twelve-gauge Boss shotgun (made in England and bought at Abercrombie and Fitch), put the end of the barrel into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew out his brains."

Dr. Scott Earle arrived at 7:40 a.m, having been summoned to the house, and he certified the death. At request of the family, the coroner did not do an autopsy.

Other members of Hemingway's immediate family also committed suicide, including his father, Clarence Hemingway, his siblings Ursula and Leicester, and his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway. Some believe that certain members of Hemingway's paternal line had a hereditary disease known as haemochromatosis (bronze diabetes), in which an excess of iron concentration in the blood causes damage to the pancreas and also causes depression or instability in the cerebrum.

Hemingway's father is known to have developed haemochromatosis in the years prior to his suicide at age fifty-nine. Throughout his life, Hemingway had been a heavy drinker, succumbing to alcoholism in his later years.

Hemingway possibly suffered from manic depression, and was subsequently treated with electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. He later blamed his memory loss, which he cited as a reason for not wanting to live, upon the ECT sessions.

Hemingway is interred in the town cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho, at the north end of town. A memorial was erected in 1966 at another location, overlooking Trail Creek, north of Ketchum. It is inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a friend, Gene Van Guilder:

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever