owl pellet

and, right on cue, after I wrote yesterday that the black walnut is also the Owl Pelleting tree, what do I find underneath it today but a freshly hoiked pellet?  This is a particularly fine one: lots of little bones.  Too small for squirrel, I think, although there is a lot of grey fur - but I' thinking it's probably mouse fur, or just maybe a small pack rat.  Whatever it was must have slipped down a treat, been digested by stomach juices, and then ... owls are the most admirably tidy birds.   

 

squirrels

We have one tree that arborists can seemingly never agree about: the majority view is that it's a black walnut, but occasionally we'll talk to one who says No, Rubbish, It's a Northern Pecan.  It would be helpful (and doubtless tasty), if they bore fruit, but they never seem to get that far.  Maybe the squirrels pillaging the blossom explains why not ... I was sitting outside trying to read, this afternoon, but they were very distracting (there are indeed two separate squirrels here, and they kept breaking off from their gorging to chase one another.

It's also the tree on which one of the owls often sits, so one finds pellets, stray bits of bird (though, now I think about it, not squirrel, so far) underneath it.  Once, there was half a rabbit, which happily disappeared.

And yes, the sky was this blue, and the mountains that lovely.

 

No Kings 3

My poster this time was a little better in the conception than the execution - but huge fun to work on it, even if I wished that I'd started drafting it weeks ago, not late last night and early this morning.  And every demo, I wish I'd been practicing my always-emaciated lettering.  It did, as ever, feel good to go out there and stand up for democracy, against war, against corruption, against state violence, against - well, everything that's happening with the scary-clown show in D.C.

Good to run into our friends Dorothy and Leo (Dorothy's poster is wonderful!)

One of my favorites ... (with a properly fitting crown ...)

Harking back to the (Portland) frogs of the last No Kings - sadly, no amphibian inflatables today, but the temperature was 85 degrees;

Miscellaneous signs:

and, some flyposting: in keeping with the spirit of the day.

 

poppies

Visual evidence of how greenery is taking over parts of our yard - plus all the poppy seeds that I threw around with energetic enthusiasm.  They are so bright and startling that in person, it looks as though there are more of them than perhaps there are.  Anyway, spring.

 

Blue and gold - Dodgers opening day

Moth has always been a keen baseball fan, so she's delighted to be back watching the Boys in Blue.  They have some particularly fetching new blue (not really Dodgers blue - more like Royal Blue) and gold caps.

I dashed outside to try and catch the military jet flypast, but F 35-Cs move rather fast, so all I had to record was some very blue sky.  As happens every year, the anxious commentators of Nextdoor and Ring were quickly online, asking Why The Military Jets? and saying We Think That Was a Missile - a new level of anxiety.  In the current climate, who can blame them ... although it always amazes me that even if these people weren't like me, with Dodgers opening night firmly marked in my calendar, you'd think they'd guess what those jets were up to.

And here, to complete the palette, are some yellow flowers by our front door.

 

feet

There are some days when I deliberately push back against Professional Academic Norms in what I'm wearing: days, usually, when I feel I'm wobbling on the edge of the job swallowing me whole.

Mind you - do such Norms even exist any more?  I have male colleagues - well, one in particular - who wear shorts from one end of the year to the other, ready to take up a trowel and sieve and plunge into full archaeological excavation mode (not very convincing in South Central LA, but it's certainly a costume).  On the other hand, some other colleagues hit what would be, for me, a level of unattainable elegance, daily.  I try for respectability, at least - but it wasn't always so: once upon a time I was my department's sartorial rebel, and fondly cherish the memory - from sometime early in the 1980s - when a student asked me, incredulously, "are lecturers [remember, this was the UK, so that meant a TT faculty member] allowed to wear jeans?"   Today, it was mood-lifting when grads passed me in the corridor and went "ooooh, SHOES."  (and if you're wondering, they're made by a Spanish firm called UIN, and are ridiculously comfortable).

 

a remarkable ceiling

... in the Tyler Pavilion, the room we were using for the dinner for our open house for admitted grad students.  All the contellations are there, and what's weird is the echo if you stand underneath and talk - like the music of the spheres.