flowers in New Orleans

A very academic day in New Orleans, giving a lecture in the Tulane art department, and when not doing that, or eating some very good food, I was polishing and burnishing the talk and making the slide show as impressively slick and apposite as it could be.  So that was all fun, if tiring.  Top - a mysterious bit of fly posting on a doorway very close to my hotel.   Bottom - a pottery lamp post outside the art department, which is faintly creepy.

 

the delights of today's travel

Greetings from DFW, where I am waiting for a very, very delayed plane to New Orleans.  I do know how crazy it is to fly late in the day into Dallas (I gather they no longer call it "turbulence" in in-flight announcements, but "air disturbance"), and that this can happen, but I had a department meeting this morning (unanticipated by me when I arranged to give this lecture - I didn't realize meeting dates would be different this month because of Passover.  You'd have thought I'd have learnt that, too).  At least I'm in a lounge where I've found the screen that will have the Dodgers on ...  Let us hope that the flight actually happens, or it'll be a night somewhere less than ideal and then an 8 hour drive.  But that would be doable, I guess ...

 

the domestic and the feral

We trust that Mothy knows how lucky she is (and Gramsci too).  Here she is, at breakfast time - and here's one of her figurative brothers or sisters in a cat colony in Mount Washington, where we went out to dinner,  This guy is, of course, fortunate to have shelter and kibble, but nothing like his spoilt domestic counterpart ...

 

turning purple

It's jacaranda time!  Only ... as I noted a week or so back, when they first started to create their purple haze, it's really very early in the year.  I usually associate them with graduation time - sometimes not even then.  Plenty of rain, periodically; a couple of mini heatwaves (not right now: it's surprisingly chilly) - I guess that's a recipe for encouraging premature flowering?  They look good, at any rate, against various bits of USC architecture (a residential hall, and the University Club).

 

and this time in (better, different) focus

... the penstemon and some (other) poppies, redux.  It was raining this morning, so everything was pleasantly soaked, and that's why, too, there's a faint haze over the bottom picture, as though it's a Russian painting (or an early Klimt) from around 1895.

 

garden, again

Some experiments in focus: the poppies and the garden path - and yes, some bits of each are in focus, which is a bit like me, today.  It's a Saturday: you'd think that I wouldn't be spending much of it doing USC admin, but alas ... On the other hand, it was indeed a beautiful day, albeit with big clouds suggesting the rain that's supposedly coming in, and so it was very tempting  to keep wandering around the flowers and admiring them ...

 

polished

I've been feeling bad about my father's silver tankard for a while: it's been looking very tarnished.  This was the tankard out of which he drank his beer every night: it's got one big dent in it, and various little ones.  I hate to think what falls off the outside table or garage bench it may have suffered during its life.  Or perhaps these blemishes happened much earlier: this was my maternal great-grandfather's tankard, judging by the WB initials on it: William Barber.  I suspect it was a retirement gift when he stepped down from the Midland Railway Police.  He kept his truncheon: I have that, in case of ... well, in case I meet the person who tried to extract 317.07 from Autozone this evening, using my credit card number, even though my card was snugly in my possession.  An Autozone in Marrero, Louisiana.  Since I made a reservation on line yesterday for something next week in New Orleans, I don't think that one has to be brains galore to work that one out.

Anyway, luckily I had already done the obvious thing, and bought some silver polish.