breakfast light

Honestly, waking up to this morning's news sent us running straight off for breakfast at Harry's (it helped that their "plato tipico," which includes eggs scrambled with nopales, and black beans, was on the menu).  It's not that I'm a Maduro supporter far from it: nasty crook.  But this latest action on the part of our regime is - in addition to being a major distraction from the Epstein files - what shall we say? - not the way to go about it.  It's as though DT thought: well, if I can't get a Peace Prize (except a chocolate coin covered in gold foil from FIFA), I'll get a War Prize.  So what next?  

 

beady eyes

Downtown: an excellent lunch with friends at La Boca (this bead and whatsits store is next door) before heading with them to see the Gustave Baumann exhibition at the NM Museum of Art.  I thought I knew Baumann's work fairly well - probably everyone in and around Santa Fe thinks so - beautiful, slightly mannered, often slightly over-bright complex woodcuts of the city and landscape nearby; of Taos Pueblo, the Grand Canyon, the Californian coast, and so on.  But I wasn't expected to be surprised by his versatility, including his abstract, or near-abstract works: these turquoise eyes are staring out of a corner in Curiosity Killed the Cat (1951), which the wall panel (the wall panels were very hit or miss in their interpretations) tells us "infers [the writer presumably means "implies"] that an undue interest in modernism might be dangerous."  Or it might be that Baumann liked painting black cats: it wasn't the only one.

This view onto an inner courtyard captures the at-one-moment raining, at-one-moment sunny nature of the day: the mountains were covered in a wonderful dusting of snow,

and later, the racing bands of dark clouds made for the first spectacular sunset of the year.

 

the ubiquitous mailbox crows of Eldorado

Let me be clear - we don't have one ourselves.  But if there's any local vernacular art - local to Eldorado itself - it's surely oriented around mailboxes: painted, personalized, and yes - in a number of cases - adorned with tin crows.  Sometimes, indeed, there's a real live crow instead, but they tend to flap away.  This one seems to have a shiny glass lozenge in its beak: I can't tell (given that it's New Year's Day) whether that's a piece of festive decoration, or an attempt to make this particular corvid stand out from the flock.

 

... and off goes 2025

Some years end with a spectacular sunset; some with grey clouds; some, like today, with some hazy yellow shafts of light, and a lot of dark sky.  In front of it sways an empty humming bird feeder ...

2025 was a year that was mostly deep grey: not in personal terms, but starting with the LA fires, and then going on, and on, and on from one political outrage to another.  I wish everyone a far far better year than the one that's just crawling out of the door.

Gramsci, however, may have the right approach: he's trying to sleep until at least the mid-terms.

 

frozen/not frozen

Given how cold it's been the last couple of nights, the birds - primarily finches and robins - are extremely pleased that the sea-green bowl is heated, so the water doesn't freeze.  The ice in the stone bowl is pretty solid, and remained that way all day.  All the same, the house is warm - hot, even - given how the low sun heats it up at this time of the year.

 

looking towards the end of the year

We are very much a Christmas-tree-comes-down-on-Twelfth Night household - at least, that's how I was raised - and I'm always glad of its festive presence in these strange days before the end of the year, in particular, when we're both back at work but not back at work.  I am so very glad that this coming semester I'm not teaching: one course release because I'm Director of Graduate Studies, and one course release that I banked aeons ago.  Just now, I was thinking - I barely feel that last semester has ended yet: I would be horrified to be heading back into the classroom two weeks from today.  Of course, if that were the case, I'd probably be looking forward to it - but since it's not, I'll simply appropriate Gramsci's inwardly thoughtful expression as I contemplate 2026.  Of course, he's probably meditating on finches.

 

winter gourd

These buffalo gourds, being completely inedible and bitter for everyone - human, animal, and bird alike - are still enduring in the roadsides of Eldorado.  I suppose they'll break down into organic components eventually (we're due to get a heavy frost tonight - that may help).  In the meanwhile, some people - children? - managed to lay a few in the road where they've been duly smashed by cars, looking for all the world like a tennis ball massacre ...