haphazard stuff

...or, when one looks on top of the bookcase from which one's just picked up one's little camera in the morning, what does one see? A zebra. I have a sense that more than one zebra has featured in this blog, which is strange, since I don't have any particular affinity that I've ever registered with these creatures (though I like them well enough). This one, made of material rather like a boot scraper, came from a Fair Trade store in Durham, NC. One orange bag, saying Lucy, and kept because of our cat, LucyFur. One rather overblown Victorian basin-and-jug set - the kind of thing that I fear Arabella Dunn would have used before putting on her false hair - bought in the antique store that used to be in the Old Jam Factory, in Oxford. One pink necklace, bought very cheaply whilst at a conference in Cambridge last summer, in an effort to make my outfit look -well, more summery. It worked in England, but not here. One imitation gold multi-strand wooden bead necklace, bought somewhere in Oxford in the 1990s, even 1980s. One turquoise necklace, from Santo Domingo pueblo, bought under the portales of the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. One silver pin, with tiny beads on it, bought in Seattle when Alice was at a conference there. All of these are resting on a black-with-wool-embroidery small rug, bought in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.

All of these add up to a rather exotic sounding collection, though they're genuinely random, indeed disorganized (I mean - why all these necklaces in my study?). But at least one can see them. For what is not there, in the background, is an air conditioning unit - our entire menagerie of these have been gathered up and put into the garage, and at last we have windows we can see out of (and that don't let in chilly air). This makes me very happy...