dryness

It really is dry here, and windy, too, which dries everything out even more.  A marker: I haven't yet pulled or murdered any tumbleweeds in the driveway or the yard - and that's the first time in twenty odd year.  Above, a soapweed yucca, down by the railroad - looking like a porcupine.  Below - yes, this looks like a sudden wild shower, but actually it's us watering the trees, a weekly treat for them.  Only this morning I managed to set up the vacillating spray so that it was inadvertently washing my study window, and here's Alice bravely stomping out to wrestle it into a more sympathetic position.

 

a catering arrangement

For the next two weeks, Alice will be doing the (evening) cooking, while I, supposedly, finish off The Book.  In practice, that means about five or six more paragraphs in the introduction, and a few more bits of tweaking elsewhere, and checking and checking, and some more checking, and changing around a few words, and panicking, and holding my head in my hands, and all the stuff like writing Alt Text captions for the images ... in other words, two weeks (plus a few days more) when cooking would provide some very welcome time-consuming procrastination.  But since I don't really have that time, I am very very grateful when some excellent stir fry appears on the table ...

 

Moth is getting washed

This is not the most elegant of positions, but I promise you - Gramsci really was doing his best to groom Moth, starting with her left ear and moving downwards.  It might look a little bit like Graham Platner behavior, but I promise you, nothing untoward was happening.  He truly does want to bond with her, whatever her agonized expression might reveal about her views on the subject.

 

usually the first

This sunflower - or, more accurately, doubtless, seeds from this sunflower - is usually the first to bloom, year after year.  However, this year it was beaten to it by a competitor next door to us: a much shorter plant, to be sure, but undoubtedly the first.  Honestly, and as I noted yesterday, it's so dry that it's amazing anything is flowering at all ...

 

camouflage

We were up and out very early this morning, getting in a walk before it warmed up.  Half way down Monte Alto a rabbit shot in front of us - and it was immediately apparent why.  I like to think we may have saved its life: the coyote was a little more apprehensive about getting close to us, and the rabbit made its escape ...

I was relieved, though: there have been a lot of rabbits, and pack rats, around this year, but this is only the second coyote I've seen.  You can see how dry it is everywhere ...coyote-colored.

 

nearly a rainbow

If one felt meteorologically optimistic, it's beginning to feel a bit like the monsoon season: all the same, it rarely feels like it did a decade or so back, with the brilliant blue skies of the morning giving way to huge thunderclouds, a storm, and a cooler evening.  Now we get a quiet and sunny morning, and then cloud coverage building up, and if we're lucky, like this afternoon, ten minutes of rain.  And it's still warm, though it smells great outside.

Of course, I can only really see this in terms of my book ... like gleams of hope that I'll finish the revisions and tidying and and and on time, but with some dark clouds periodically impinging.  But I did some good bits of rewriting (and cutting) today ... onwards ...

 

deletion

Of course, Gramsci's adorable little murder mitten looks harmless enough here - but he tried to put it to work on the keyboard quite a few times.  He particularly likes stretching around the screen when I'm typing away ... or deleting away.  I had one of those days today that involved more excision than substitution, and that, in turn, meant getting rid of what I thought were, in themselves, good paragraphs that represented a good deal of research and thought... but did they actually fit my argument?  Thematically they were relevant, indeed - but the chapter, and indeed the book, has developed a sharper focus since they first made their appearance.  So I suspect that they'll stay out, not least because the book will be pressing up tightly against its word limit.  But cutting things away is never an easy thing to do ...