our first poppy!

I'm used to snowdrops, then primroses, as harbingers of spring.  Here, it's ... poppies.  There were two out today - our first.  The other was a standard single toned orange Californian poppy: this one (from a packet of variegated poppies, but usually it's just the plain orange ones that germinate and flower) has a particularly sophisticated two-tone look.  

 

Emiliano!

So this is what happens when one gives a handsome black poodle a toy llama to beat up on ...

Emiliano is a particularly lovely dog, and I'm sure that I think so in part because although I wasn't brought up with dogs at all, one of my mother's closest friends, Ann Bonsor, had a long succession of poodles - everything from big standard ones to miniature ones (on that scale. Emiliano is kind of medium).  I remember Matty, who was, I believe, brown, in particular.  Then there was a Lucy (were they always female?) - and I now realize that I may never be able to recollect all of the rest of them.  Oh!  There was Polly!  She was the first who I remember - I think she was grey.  Anyway, I do really like poodles ...

 

signs of spring

Yes, I know it's Southern California, and we've been having on and off crazy heatwaves for a while, now - but all the same, plants continue to bloom according to their genetic patterns, and I walked very slowly around the garden this morning admiring what's coming out.  This, above, is some kind of delicate geranium (and me experimenting with a fixed lens camera, as opposed to an iPhone).

Our Ring camera system is currently proving, very well, the inadequacy of AI when it comes to visual recognition.  It's recently taken to giving verbal descriptions of what it records.  "A person at the front door," is clear enough, or "A person with a packet is descending the steps," or even "A person with a watering can is walking in the yard."  It's thrown by the spiders that inevitably scuttle across its line of sight: "Seems like nothing interesting happened."  But it can be very baffled by humans.  Last week it identified me as a "brown deer," which, even if not a gazelle, was faintly flattering.  Today, as I walked up the steps from the lower part of the garden, "A grey and white bird is walking along the rail."  Huh?

And below: California coast sunflower, or California brittlebush, or Encelia californica.  This is doing rather well.

 

69 years ...

Véronique and I have known each other sixty nine years, more or less.  I won't say that we've been friends all that length of time - lop a few years off - because the first time I met her, her mother (my own mother's best friend from school) thought that I might like to help change her diaper, which three year old me thought was completely gross...

The last time we were in Century City together, however, would have been ... in March 1988, when I was doing some work in UCLA library before giving talks at UC Riverside and Cal Tech.  That was my first trip to LA, and mercifully she baled me out of the horrible hotel I'd landed in on Sepulveda - probably a Day's Inn? I had no money to speak of.  A few hours into my visit, I thought Los Angeles was all oil derricks and pouring rain, which proved to be a misleading impression, in the long run.  But I found a pay phone, and called Véronique, and she swept me off to stay in her apartment in Santa Monica, which was ... a change of scenery, and wonderful.  It still rained, though ... One day, and that was before the Mall was a consumerist dream, she took me to her office which was high up in one of the towers, and I looked down on the hazy city ...that was a long time before I had even the faintest idea we'd both end up in the same place.

 

drive home

I always appreciate this particular row of palm trees interspersed with street lights, the built and the vegetative side by side.  It was a long day: admin, more admin, and some admin.  I'm using the light here - natural and artificial, too - to remind me that there must be some at the end of the tunnel ...

two green bicycles

Definitely a sustainability metaphor here!  Since these were on campus, parked outside the School of Social Work, quite the best thing about them is that they were stationary, and not part of the battery of wheeled objects that hurtle towards one with students on them.  

 

tree shadow

Coming out of Taper Hall this evening, I was stopped by this beautifully framed shadow.  I feel there ought to be a metaphor lurking within this ...