very May grey

For those of you who envy living in sunny Southern California ... this month and next - and with luck for longer - we often have a marine layer in the mornings, that sometimes lingers right on into the later part of today.  This morning it was drizzling, too.  So this view from our walk down by the Zoo, a couple of miles from our house, but looking up onto the same hilly part of Griffith Park - this might as well be Scotland.  No sheep, though.

 

Joe Boone's retirement party

Very excellent to get to celebrate Joe Boone's retirement today - a celebration that had to be delayed, but that was so very well worth it: a great gathering of colleagues and former grad students; and moving speeches that only conveyed a fraction of the love and gratitude that was ... I was going to write "in the room" - in the garden?

That would be Meg Russett's beautiful garden.

Bill Handley giving a heartfelt speech: it's a long time since I first met Bill, when he was a grad rep on the Faculty Board in Oxford, where he was already eloquent, but I don't know that I ever foresaw that he and I would be colleagues in Southern California ...

and then there were plenty of dear friends, colleagues, and former colleagues: the summer may not exactly have started yet (another week and a half of duties); but it felt like we're nearly there!

 

May Day

The poppies are still going strong!  So, indeed, are plenty of other native flowers and flowering plants, although admittedly the dominant color here is green.  Alas, between the Lugg movers arriving with the contents of Alice's office (and balking at the idea that it would be possible to carry tall unwieldy bookshelves down stairs that have rather a lot of corners in them, so plans will have to change); and endless end-of-semester grad studies admin stuff, there wasn't a whole lot of time to consider the joys of a rural retreat.

 

bookshelf issues

Tomorrow is the day that Alice's books, bookcases (thank goodness), and such like make their move from her (former) campus office to our house.  I'm sure we'll be able to fit them in, somewhere - it's remarkable what a logistical puzzle that turns out to be, even in a big house (electrical outlets, central heating vents, windows, doors, etc etc).  This bookcase will move from my study up to a bedroom - presumably without the tabby and white ornament - and something taller, and with more shelves, will take its place.

 

the worm within the bud

Actually, I don't really think this is invisible worm damage to this Blakean Sick Rose - more like very hungry greenfly.  This is Wedgwood, a David Austin rose that succumbed entirely to various forms of floral-hating blight last year.  This time round, I doused it in soap and water a month or so back; and it's just had another round of Neem oil.  It has a number of buds at different stages of opening, and I have hope for some of them, even if others look a little wan and drooping (rather like me, at whatever point of the endless semester we've got to).

 

very Los Angeles

I'm sure this could, really, be very many American cities, but the combination of signs - smoke shop and electric car charging - and stylized wall painting - and scrappy and unsafe looking electrical cables says LA to me - plus the blue sky.  Or at the least, it's a little typical corner from my drive to work.

 

Californian clouds and mountains

These were looking particularly fine today.  I know the flight path between Albuquerque and LAX so very well, in large part because I know the ground beneath so well - so I can look out of the window and check off town after town as we fly slightly south of I-40, and then drop down to follow I-10, roughly.  But as we go over the mountains of the Mojave - Coxcomb Mountains; Eagle Mountain, and so on - I always feel less oriented; the roads are less obvious - at least until we get to Salton Sea and Palm Springs territory.  And today, the clouds were clumping over these mountains, and making the ground invisible, and creating a momentary sense of strangeness and wonder instead of the very familiar (all intimations of the wondrously strange are, of course, instantly shattered when one drops down and sees the endless sprawl of LA).