a flower gets its close-up

I've been cleaning the closet in my study today - a very long overdue job, despite various surface attempts that have been made over the last decade or so.  You never know what you will find - but I was delighted to uncover my camera's Micro lens (yes, I know that, in turn, that's an odd thing to.misplace entirely, but I never managed to work it properly, so it was languishing).  Today I, er, read the manual responsibly ....

My study closet had corners that were like a creative graveyard.  I'm less talking about dead felt tip pens than old software: remember when one had to insert a CD in order to install various early forms of Photoshop; for things like free photo borders that came with magazines that probably no longer exist in hard copy; for installing printers, and stuff for one's iPod (remember iPods?); and to run Tom Tom - that early form of GPS that didn't work very well at all, and inevitably ran out of usefulness when cell phone coverage, or its equivalent, lapsed.  The recent past sometimes seems a long time ago ...

 

curdled sky

A modest view of the great outdoors from - more or less - outside our fron door this morning, before I descended into a day from which I emerged with a promotion letter for someone at another institution written and polished.  These things take so long!  It's satisfactory when they're completed, sure - and one agrees to write them because - well, that's the way the system works.  But it's one of the profession's stranger genres.

 

cat in a tree trunk

Someone has a brand new crinkle tunnel, with a couple of side branches.  Its purchase was inspired, of course, by my chapter on Bark.  It lacks lichen, but it does have a few green leaves flapping off it, and, quite wonderfully, there are some really kitsch squirrels photo-superimposed on it.  Grammy has never seen a tunnel, or box (or bath) that he didn't want to inhabit, but I'm pleased to report that Moth did her own inspection and temporary occupation.

 

alliums

they are out! - in our front yard.  I always marvel at how one day they look like bulging chive stems, and the next they're a flurry of stalks and flowers and black seeds.  And when the storm burst this afternoon, I realised that one reason why they do so well in that precise spot is that water pours from the roof down one of the canales onto the, - even though we've been in such a drought, clearly enough moisture has been deposited on them, one way or another, for them to flourish once again.

 

morning light

shining through the kitchen window, blocked by the tin horse, and reaching the fireplace: a thin morning sun coming through thin cloud, or haze - I don't think smoke, because it was blowing east, not south, today.

 

the bathtub

It may be that Gramsci is in hunting mode - one might, indeed, find a spider in the bathtub, and if one's exceptionally lucky, a centipede, or a Jerusalem bug.  But actually, between the outer curtain, and the inner curtain, and the bath mat - so many possibilities for hide and seek.  He's been in a boisterous mood today, for all that he looks like a bathtub philosopher (that would be Diogenes of Sinope, I think, although in the Gérôme painting of this ancient cynic in his tub, he's surrounded by a lot of rather wolf-like, unfriendly dogs).

 

stripey morning glory

My morning glories here self-seed, year after year, and natural selection seems to have ensured that by now they are mostly Grandpa Ott, with a smaller number of deep pink ones.  But this morning ... a solitary pale blue and purple Harlequin made its appearance above the petunias, and very lovely it was, too.