Monday, March 18, 2024

orchid


One of Alice's (many) orchids, looking happy and healthy in the morning sun.  Since in my British Art and Empire grad class tomorrow we're discussing The Botanical Empire, and since I've been preparing that all day (well, when not inverted in the dentist's chair, or doing undergraduate grading), this seems a highly suitable image.  

Sunday, March 17, 2024

creek, coffee, view


I swear I always feel more wrung out when we return from New Mexico on I-10 rather than I-40/15, but we're back!  The cats, despite excellent care in our absence, are delighted to see us.  

Here's the view of Oak Creek from our room this morning - flowing decidedly more fully than yesterday; the interior of Oak Creek Expresso, purveyors of excellent coffee and muffins; and a view from our first rest stop, somewhere on the wild mountains above Phoenix.



 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

on the road


On the road ... back to LA, via Sedona.  Top - between Winslow and Flagstaff (where for a quarter of an hour it started to snow, which - since I was driving - I could have done without ... ) and then below, from our room overlooking Oak Creek, just before dinner with friends from LA/New Haven - whom we discovered would be staying at the same hotel as us, which is decidedly a weird coincidence.  My father, who delighted in coincidences, would have approved ... Beautiful skies all the way; weather a bit of a gamble; can't wait to see Moth and Gramsci tomorrow ...


 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Eldorado windmill (and a baking PSA)


On a suitably blowy day, I at last remembered to take round the homeowners' association fees to the Eldorado Community Improvement Association's offices - not quite late.  It's a mystery why the buildings here - I have my back to them - are built in Kansas ranch mode, and aren't remotely Northern New Mexican.  As it is, the photo, in its black and white form, could have been taken at any time in the last hundred years, almost anywhere in the West.  Or maybe not - when did parking spaces start to be designated with lines?

The windmill doesn't seem to rotate - or it would have been spinning wildly.  We've been weather forecast gazing all day - we haven't left for lower land, yet, though we were tempted, for the assurance that we'd be able to get out - let's hope it doesn't snow too much in the night.  One can never tell, in Eldorado.

And I made some excellent maple syrup flapjacks for the road.  Only ... somehow I have never realized that wax paper isn't parchment paper, and in a hot oven, it melts and sticks.  Oh.  So I chilled them, and have been scraping them off, and now have a very tasty bag full of granola ...

 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

railrunner views


I so love taking the Rail Runner up or down from Albuquerque - one has much more of a sense of the northern New Mexico landscape passing through it, and especially going through several pueblos - Katishtya/San Felipe, Kewa/Santo Domingo - as opposed to whizzing along on the busy interstate.  It was super-busy when I took the rental car back this morning - and then extremely calming taking the (free!) Albuquerque #50 bus to the station, and the $4 ride up to Santa Fe, past all the wintry cotton trees that border the fertile land around the Rio Grande. I was delighted to see so many acequias - very long-standing community ditches - filled with water, and doing their irrigation work.  I actually wanted one of the new acequia-themed number plates for my new car, but I think it requires a bit of an effort to obtain that ...




 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

spring weather


The best that can be said of it is that it's uncertain.  We keep anxiously scanning the weather forecast to see what it might be doing on Saturday, when we're due to leave, and trying to work out if it would be better to depart on Friday - even if we don't want to.  I went on two walks today - deceptively potentially sunny, but with a vicious wind when one turned in one direction.  And that's not counting the dramatic hail storm (when we were snug inside).

 

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

a (very belated) celebration


A dinner tonight at Geronimo's, to celebrate Alice's book contract with OUP.  This was meant to have happened back in very early January, but we canceled because I thought that I'd still be testing positive for Covid (even though that in fact disappeared very quickly indeed).  Anyway - here we were, and Canyon Road was its usual magical nighttime self, and the experience wasn't too triggering of the last time that we were there, which was to pick up Thanksgiving Dinner in 2020, everyone standing in isolated terror in the freezing cold road, waiting for our bags of food to appear ... 

I was too captivated by the excellence of the food to take photos of it, but believe me, it was beautiful as well as exceptionally tasty.  And that's a cocktail with vodka and cucumber and lime and smoked salt, since you were wondering.