local lichen

It's been a while since I've celebrated lichen here ... I was sitting outside on a rock this afternoon, painting some boards in a range of sample colors: one of them will end up being the new paint for the trim on our house here when we get it re-stuccoed very soon (what color do I want? "lichen" is the best description I can find, though "winter chamisa" may run it close: I think it'll likely end up being something called "misted green."  Anyway - what color is lichen?  None of these is quite what I meant ...).

 

sleeping animals

One of these animals is not like the others ... we went to Petsmart this morning to buy some cat litter, and they had some truly adorable ferrets.  I swear my mother kept ferrets when she was a little girl, but it might have been Auntie Marjorie across the road (though I think she had rabbits, and the two aren't exactly compatible).  But I doubt I have a note of this anywhere, and so can probably never verify it ...

And that, I thought, was it for sleeping animals of note for today.  But after lunch, I didn't sit in my desk chair since Moth was in it, and was reading peacefully in my armchair - then looked round, and thought - no, surely Moth doesn't have that many paws?  In five years, I have never, ever seen them curled up asleep together.  They can hardly have been doing it to keep warm (although admittedly, the a/c was on).  This went on for a while, and was the sweetest thing.  Maybe a corner has been turned?

And Gramsci is even more adorable than a white ferret.

 

marigolds

Clearly, I've not changed my camera lens, and am still experimenting with semi close-up focusing ... all the while assessing which plants I'll uproot from their pots and transplant, in a couple of weeks, from dry New Mexico to scorching Los Angeles.  The car journey is always an adventure, because of going through the agricultural checkpoint: although it's legal to transport horticulture from Santa Fe county to California, one can sound like a very pesky know-it-all if one gets stopped and tries to explain.  In any case, the herbs will all come, and the geraniums, and after that ...?  Not that the photogenic quality of one plant over another is a determining factor ...

 

a flower gets its close-up

I've been cleaning the closet in my study today - a very long overdue job, despite various surface attempts that have been made over the last decade or so.  You never know what you will find - but I was delighted to uncover my camera's Micro lens (yes, I know that, in turn, that's an odd thing to.misplace entirely, but I never managed to work it properly, so it was languishing).  Today I, er, read the manual responsibly ....

My study closet had corners that were like a creative graveyard.  I'm less talking about dead felt tip pens than old software: remember when one had to insert a CD in order to install various early forms of Photoshop; for things like free photo borders that came with magazines that probably no longer exist in hard copy; for installing printers, and stuff for one's iPod (remember iPods?); and to run Tom Tom - that early form of GPS that didn't work very well at all, and inevitably ran out of usefulness when cell phone coverage, or its equivalent, lapsed.  The recent past sometimes seems a long time ago ...

 

curdled sky

A modest view of the great outdoors from - more or less - outside our fron door this morning, before I descended into a day from which I emerged with a promotion letter for someone at another institution written and polished.  These things take so long!  It's satisfactory when they're completed, sure - and one agrees to write them because - well, that's the way the system works.  But it's one of the profession's stranger genres.

 

cat in a tree trunk

Someone has a brand new crinkle tunnel, with a couple of side branches.  Its purchase was inspired, of course, by my chapter on Bark.  It lacks lichen, but it does have a few green leaves flapping off it, and, quite wonderfully, there are some really kitsch squirrels photo-superimposed on it.  Grammy has never seen a tunnel, or box (or bath) that he didn't want to inhabit, but I'm pleased to report that Moth did her own inspection and temporary occupation.

 

alliums

they are out! - in our front yard.  I always marvel at how one day they look like bulging chive stems, and the next they're a flurry of stalks and flowers and black seeds.  And when the storm burst this afternoon, I realised that one reason why they do so well in that precise spot is that water pours from the roof down one of the canales onto the, - even though we've been in such a drought, clearly enough moisture has been deposited on them, one way or another, for them to flourish once again.