contemplating the garden path

... as one does, when rain is on the way, and when we've just been talking to our garden person - not the landscape designer herself (who lives in Tucson), but the plants and water and maintenance and general expert guy (who now has a wonderful German boyfriend, and lives in ... Berlin).  This is not 100% ideal, since we only get to see him twice a year - though now he has a visa this should become once a season - and facetiming him with, say, problems with dwarf lavender (very dwarf - not visible here, and barely visible if the camera were pointing in the other direction) isn't super-convenient.  But he is a lovely person, even if given to enthusiasms that sometimes prove to be a bit hit or miss.  Today's real issue were the citrus trees in pots, which seem not be be draining, and they're not doing well in them anyway ... we do love the pots, like a Mediterranean garden, but it would be great if the Meyer lemon wasn't drooping and wilting ...

 

hawk, seahawks

This handsome red-tailed hawk was disemboweling another bird this morning at the reservoir.  I'm hoping it wasn't a heron (it does have rather long legs, but I'm hoping not long enough ...).  I love those herons, but I also love raptors, and do understand their need for breakfast.  Still.  It was a very nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw start to the day.

And later ... Moth and Gramsci were as riveted as us (yawn) by the Superbowl, but yay to Sam Darnold, our former USC quarterback, for his performance.  And yay to Bad Bunny (and Villa's Tacos!) for the half time show, which was fun, and went far beyond that.  But oh, all of those endless ads for different forms of AI (or clearly made using AI), which made me very grateful for the reality of feathered, bloodthirsty hawks.

 

what retirement looks like ...

From my own perspective of being four weeks into the semester, I'd say that Alice looks enviably happy and relaxed ... (outside a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena where we were meeting some friends for lunch: exceptionally good guacamole).  Mind you, it does seem to be the case that her wallet is empty.

 

Getty graduate conference

A long day of graduate art history papers from nine Californian universities - and our representative, Margot Yale, did us proud.  There were many more people than one can see here (and those empty chairs on the platform are for the conversations that followed each of the three groups of papers) - I don't know why it looks so sparse!  As always, the Getty Research Institute organized this splendidly (and fed us well).  And outside, Bird of Paradise flowers, and (though on this visit, I only grabbed a very quick look) a Guerrilla Girls exhibit.  Despite the admin that kept hurtling into my inbox like a rattle of little pebbles against a window pane, it was wonderful to be immersed in a range of very different research projects for the day (although nothing between the C12th and the C20th!).

 

academic conversations

It's time for the annual Getty Graduate Student Symposium, preceded, this afternoon, by a get-together of Directors of Graduate Studies/Chairs and lots of Getty Research Institute staff, discussing - discussing what, exactly?  The state of graduate studies; the form that PhDs should/might take; preparing grad students for a world in which they might start thinking earlier in their graduate careers than they do of ways in which their skills might be used for things other than academic jobs and high-flying curatorial positions.  But we never got to the nitty gritty of how to manoeuvre students away gently, ever so gently, from the fantasies of jobs that just don't exist ... (and that carry with them, of course, the privilege of having a glass of wine outdoors on a warm February night, with the sun setting on the Pacific in the background).

 

the annual magnificence

For a couple of weeks, this is the view from my bedroom window in the early morning, when the sun is turning Griffith Park gold (I know it looks like autumnal leaves, but it's just grass and shrub), and the Asian Pear is ... blossomy. We think it's as old as the house, which is why it's so unusually huge, despite (or maybe because of) its annual pruning.  I know I post what must look like the same photo every year ... but it's a celebratory ritual, or has become one.  Looking back, I see that when we first moved in - thirteen years ago this week!  Can that really be the case? - I thought it was a Camphor Tree.  I wonder why ...

 

perched on the handlebars

Very springlike, to be sure.  These birds are on a slightly decrepit bicycle parked outside Taper Hall: an endearingly normal, non-electric bicycle - in other words, one of the vehicles that's marginally less likely to run you over on campus.  The electric bikes, the scooters - not too long ago, there were Campus Safety goons on their own bicycles making people get off and walk in the crucial central parts, but these days there is zero effort made to stop speeding students mowing one down.  To state the obvious, this must be a nightmare for people with mobility or vision issues.