a barber's

On the way back from Keck this afternoon (another good check-up for Alice!!) - and past this barber's shop.  The model is strangely butch, but I think notionally male.  And on the left ... clearly, this is a week in which I'm destined to come across men who are stuck behind bars of one sort or another, although this one doesn't especially look as though he needs rescuing - I hope.

autumnal (and a picture I didn't take)

I love these dank and chilly mornings, when the mist makes it look as though we live in the middle of the countryside (and then it lifts, and the temperature is a balmy 74 degrees).

But this isn't the mental image that will stay with me today.  I was walking to buy a salad at Trader Joe's at lunchtime today - a route to the university village that tales me through the music school, and then past a little enclosure surrounded by wood palings - and inside that are recycling bins, where the university janitors dump stuff.  I suddenly saw a thin brown hand that was reaching out from inside, rattling the bolt.  I'll confess - my split-second reaction was "oh, that'd make an amazing picture" - but I'm glad to say that before I could act on the thought, I'd moved over to the fencing and wriggled the bolt open, and let out the poor guy who'd been stuck in there: a man, I'd say, between 60 and 70, very emaciated, probably South Asian, and foraging for recyclable cans and plastic bottles inside.  He was very grateful: I kept saying how terrible that he was there, and that I hoped he'd not been there too long; he kept saying thank you, thank you - he didn't have very much English.  I just can't get my head around the fact that someone must have locked him in there - and no one else seemed to have noticed.  

The image of that hand reaching out will stick with me much more vividly than any photo I might have taken.

a rant about our university "bookstore"

An extraordinary sight today - I walked into the USC "book"store (looking not for a book, but for a dongle to attach computer to a VGA) - and lo, there were Books!  They've been banished to the basement the last couple of years: that is, you can go down there and get a text book, if you're a student - but if you just want a book to read, I guess you go to an Amazon locker in the University Village.  Goodbye to browsing, etc.

But, indeed, BOOKS.  But what books?  Newt Gingrich's Trump Versus China.  Admittedly, Gingrich spoke on campus - to an event hosted by Young American for Freedom - but that was on October 29th.  We still have all of these books on display??  Who paid what, to whom?  

I won't even start to speculate about the fact that they are flanked by two other volumes, A Man Walks Into a Hardware Store and Gloryous Dance Affair.  Somehow they don't sound like real books.   

At least this raised my blood pressure to a point that I forgot, temporarily, about all the other things that were chewing away at me today ...

post-Halloween, again ...

No critters have, as yet, demolished the large dappled pumpkin - although A seems to have placed what I can only call a Kitten pumpkin on top of it.  How long will it last?  How long is it seemly to keep a pumpkin on display into November?  I seem to have a lot of imponderable issues, here.

Halloween is over, but ...

... this was a particularly impressive spider in our front yard this morning.  This photo also makes it look as though we live in an over-Gothicized graveyard: I promise you that this is only a large massy rosemary bush or three, and the railings at the top of our steps.  But indeed, there are days when it doesn't (from certain angles) look like Sunny California, despite the temperatures reaching the high eighties today (with only two fires visible from our house ...).

a row of piñatas

Of course I know I shouldn't take a photo whilst driving, even when the traffic is only crawling along.  But these piñatas were too amazing to resist.  For a year or so, the production of the people in this house has been getting ever more ambitious - from large balls and stars, we now seem to have progressed to child-sized figures ...

lichen pendant

I bought this pendant over the summer, to add to my decidedly off-beat collection of lichen jewelry.  It's so heavy that it would probably bend my neck vertebrae if I were to wear it - but it hangs as a research prompt in my office window ...