Sky. Trees. Happy day.

Our garden is a lovely place to lie down and look up. I adore those wonderfully ubiquitous palm trees against that almost always blue sky.

I read something last year about the palm trees eventually dying out in Southern California. I hope it's untrue because images like this will always make me feel like I did when I first arrived in Los Angeles 20 years ago: giddy, hopeful, expansive, and in love with all those silly topknot trees waving above the streets of this city. To me they are reminders that LA doesn't take itself too seriously.

That's one of the main reasons I love it here.

And if whimsical trees aren't enough to make you smile, just see the clouds through the eyes of my 3 year old daughter. (She prompted me to snap this picture.)

"Look, Mommy. There's a happy face right up there in the sky!"

Indeed.