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!