next door ... coming soon!

The vans full of Staging Furniture were there bright and early this morning, and apparently were there all day ... any moment now, we will be officially looking for new neighbors.  The screen writer next door realised that much though she loved the house, it somehow wasn't suitable for two very tiny children (given that it's on a steep hill, and is all stairs, inside and out, with no flat outside play space whatsoever, you'd have thought that she might have considered that before buying it in the first place, but people are ... well, let's just say that she must have fallen in love with the view).

 

not the real thing, BUT ...

Two nights ago, I was down in my study, working ... and Gramsci was convinced there was a mouse sharing our space.  He was fixated on the area under my mother's old desk, behind the books, behind more books... Admittedly, sometimes I thought I heard a very slight rustling - but it could have been a large moth (or, worse, still, a cockroach), but on balance, I thought it best (or cowardly) ignored.  

No sounds yesterday, although Gramsci was strangely fixated when we went to bed.  Usually he climbs onto my chest, into my arms, purrs.  Last night ... he fetched the red mouse (seen above), shook it, chased it on and off the bed, and eventually fetched another (yellow) mouse from a different part of the room, and repeated the performance.

Was he trying to tell me something?  Surely.  This morning, he disappeared down to my study, pre-breakfast.  I was trying to leave by 6.30, a long and painful dental appointment awaiting me on the other side of town.  Then at 6.29, I found him in the dining room, guarding the sweetest and unharmed (physically, that is - who knows about psychological scars?) little field mouse hiding behind the door.  She was captured under a plastic bowl, and escorted to a safe space down the garden.

Grammy is very pleased with himself.  Myself, I'm blown away by what he was telling me through that role play with the toy mice.

 

sniffing spring

In truth, it was a grey, gloomy, and very chilly day, which began with some light rain.  All the same, the wisteria is out down the street, and so is the - is it a gardenia?  Alice is sniffing it, hoping to find out.  

 

abandoned?

Or, more likely, dropped, and rescued, and left for her ... does one say "owner," for a doll as self-possessed as this one?  "Person"?  ... to come and find her again.  By Silver Lake reservoir, which seems to be a positive mecca for lost toys, but this one is lifelike enough to make one hunt for some kind of narrative, some kind of metaphor, here.

 

The Poet's Wife

She's out right on time: all that rain a few weeks ago encouraged her.  I still don't know which poet - the David Austin website doesn't explain, although it does inform one that she has 77 petals, which seems rather special.  

 

wooing potential graduate students

Two busy days of hoping that we can persuade the graduate students to whom we've made offers to come ... and today was a morning - and lunch - at the Huntington: some paintings; a library visit - both of those with a colleague - and a walk round the desert garden (and past the poppies - why are they so much more advanced than ours? I guess they get more sun ...) - and lunch, before back to another class visit, and dinner (before they all headed off to a bar)  It's always strange at this stage: they seem always like our new class, and they seem like a bonded flock - and then there are always some that one never sees again - or next sees at CAA, or when they apply for a job in the department some seven years later, or or or ...  

 

balloons

I don't know.  Only they emphatically are not cardinal and gold, and therefore fairly inexplicable.  They are very variegated in their blueness - I'd say: are they for the Dodgers home opener tomorrow, but really none of them are a true Dodgers blue.  Maybe they're to welcome our Graduate Prospective to campus?  It was such a gloomy day, in terms of the weather (and in terms of university and national politics, for that matter) that anything cheering was welcome.