one of these things is not like the others

It's getting to that time of the year when I start to tidy and purge my closets and drawers: this weekend it's been shoes.  I do, admittedly, have more shoes than I strictly speaking need, although this year I am really being ruthless, and I'm going to rehome some (not shown here) that I love, but that are quite definitely too small for me.  Shoes aren't like clothes - as one's feet get older and flatter, there's no way that one's ever going to fit into them again.

This purge, however, has to be understood in the light of the disruption that it's caused, because Gramsci ... is terrified of shoes.  He thinks that they all have spiders, or maybe centipedes, in them.  He approaches them warily; pounces on laces with a sudden outstretched paw; creeps, here, round the left-hand edge.  Clearly, at some formative moment that we didn't witness, something Very Bad attacked him from a shoe (we suspect a Santa Fe centipede, but we lack proof).  So he's found today very distressing.  I even had to carry him past them, at one point.  So ... why is it that I think that Moth is making some kind of point involving superiority, courage, or general one up-cat-ship?

 

stripes

I've only once had a camera card get corrupted on me before I had time to download photos, and that was a card that recorded Alice and my first trip together to Italy, in 2006.  So there were pictures of Spoleto, maybe of Rome, certainly of Venice.  What's strange is that I printed out a handful - but if they were ever on a computer, the likelihood of my being able to find the right cables to open it up again is slender, and in any case, if they were ever on a computer, then I surely would have been able to find them when the card stopped functioning.  Etc.  Etc.  In any case, one of the photos I remember most clearly - and so was most sorry to have lost - was taken in Spoleto, and since it involved test patches of external paint, it was near abstract.  You can imagine how happy I was to find a comparable set of patches on a wall down our street today, and indeed this image is even more satisfying, because of the shadows.

There's also a tale here about one remembering images that one once framed in a camera viewfinder, even if the image itself was lost twenty years ago.  

 

morning corner

This was some perfect illumination as I walked into the living room this morning.  But the presence on the shelf of my much treasured bulto by Ernie Lujan, Nuestra Señora de los Afligidos (very useful when one's feeling low), gives me the perfect opportunity to say how very much I appreciate Pope Leo XIV (no relation to Leo in my office) and his sustained attack on those who wage war in God's name.  Jesus "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them,” he said in a homily in late March, and he's not let up since.  Go Leo!  

 

proof of Leo's longevity

and what did I find today, in a box in my office, but a picture of me with Leo in my very first Oxford office, in Mansfield College, when he was a very new purchase indeed.  I can tell that I've only very recently arrived, because I quite soon painted the whole thing a strong deep blue, like being inside the heavens but without the stars.  Note two other things: the sagging rubber plant on top of the filing cabinet (there was always a rubber plant, back last century), and, on the desk, my very first computer, an Amstrad.  I thought I was so hip and cool having such a thing!  If you remember them, green lettering stuttered its way across the screen - one font only - and then, if the connection worked ok, one could print stuff out on a rattling dot-matrix printer.  The pic also works as a reminder that my current office is the smallest that I've had in my whole career: definitely downward mobility in terms of academic real estate, but I'm curiously fond of it, all the same, even if it's full of - because it's full of? - books and storage boxes and, seemingly, lions.

 

car park roof

Today was one of those miraculous Southern Californian days when the air was very fresh and clear after last night's (welcome) rain: just some remnants of clouds heading off to the mountains.  And they, and the light and puddles, rendered the morning transcendent (at least until, of course, I shuffled off to sort out travel and research grant awards for our grad students).

 

a graduating scooter?

If a scooter had a major, what would it be?  It's getting closer and closer to Commencement time, and students can be seen carrying packets with sashes in them.  This scooter, however, seems dressed in cardinal and gold rather as a statue of Buddha might have a garland thrown casually but reverently round its neck, or a sacred cow might be wreathed with marigolds.

 

owl pellet

and, right on cue, after I wrote yesterday that the black walnut is also the Owl Pelleting tree, what do I find underneath it today but a freshly hoiked pellet?  This is a particularly fine one: lots of little bones.  Too small for squirrel, I think, although there is a lot of grey fur - but I' thinking it's probably mouse fur, or just maybe a small pack rat.  Whatever it was must have slipped down a treat, been digested by stomach juices, and then ... owls are the most admirably tidy birds.