first thing in the morning

Yes, I needed an early start (it was an another extremely full day) - but Gramsci was perhaps a little over-insistent that I get out of bed immediately.  Is there any wonder that one of his names is Mr Whiskers Akimbo?  Look at them.  Also, the long one on his right side - disappearing out of the picture - is now four inches long.  That is impressive.  In any case, you don't stay in bed long with that face staring at you, pointedly.

 

a large stump

I never noticed a large, dying, rotting, precarious tree on campus - but I guess it must have been is a sad way, because it is Felled, and the ground covered with sawdust.  There are many metaphors to be extracted from this.

 

draconian

Some years ago, back when Santa Fe had a very good pharmacy called Pharmaca that also sold an assortment of often unusual gift-like goods, I purchased a long dragon.  You can't see his length here, but he goes all the way across two solid bookcases.  I'm not sure what he is - a scarf?  A draft excluder?  And yes, of course I bought him vaguely thinking he was in USC colors, but somehow I haven't quite summoned up the - the what?  The courage? The craziness? to wear him round my neck to a football game.  I may yet ... Of course, the coloring may have something to do with Harry Potter - there's an uneasy overlap between USC and Hogwarts in that respect - but whatever the truth might be, and even if draping him over a bookshelf mightn't be his intended role, I've always been cheered by him, and the institutional flames emanating from his nostrils.

 

birthday photobomb

I was just setting up a tasteful still life - the card that the cats had sent me, and, rather wonderfully, the camellia that Alice had picked for the birthday breakfast table (for which: read the kitchen butcher block) and that happened to be the very same flower that I photographed yesterday.  But Moth, having other ideas, leapt into the picture ...

It was one of those days oscillating between the festive (Alice cooked some excellent salmon for dinner) and the desperate - (when am I going to get my teaching prep done? - that is, the right images lined up for the right power points).  It's not just years, but decades since I last taught an undergraduate long-C19th British art course - plenty of grad courses in this area, to be sure, but not the bread and butter stuff.  So what power points I might have for some of the material - material that's not formed part of grad courses, and of course there is plenty of overlap - is decanted onto jump drives that are sitting in Santa Fe; and before that, back in Oxford, it was, of course, the weekly trek over to the Art History slide library in Beaumont Street to, yes, borrow slides that then went into a carousel ... I know I should have put together my own efficient slide cache by now (and of course I have, so far as my research goes) - but that's one of those resolutions that never quite happens when it comes to Possible Teaching Needs.

It's been, however, a very good birthday!

 

velvet in the velvetty gloom

I'm sure that I ought to be able to draw some kind of metaphor out of this.  However, it is what it looks like: a camellia is a camellia is a camellia (on the back steps leading down to our yard).

 

more railings, more wires

 - that is, another set of abstract shapes seen while driving up S. Hoover Street.  Two days running: this of course is evidence of stalled traffic, and days crammed so full of teaching and teaching prep and meetings that there's precious little time to look around me inventively.  Well, I could have offered a shot of the dentist's fearsome array of tools - picks and grinders and a syringe containing - what? At least it wasn't for poking in me, this time - but there wasn't really the opportunity.  Slowly, slowly, slowly with the mouth, but all's going as it should.  Maybe I'll be able to eat something more solid than yogurt and pasta and fish, one of these days ...

 

railings

Driving home, on S. Hoover St - one of those moments when lines and light fall into some excellent relationships with one another.