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.

 

garden, spring

It was a very misty morning, but - when I took a quick tour round the garden before heading off to USC - that didn't prevent me seeing quite how much had grown during the heatwave that happened while we were away.  This is looking up the slope to a house above us; past the lemon and lime trees that were planted out and seem to be doing much better now that they've been liberated from their pots; some poppies, sage, mustard ... it's (deliberately) one of the more wildernessy parts.

 

beauty at both ends

Waking up to St Pancras; welcomed home by Gramsci (and Moth - busy eating).  And that was Spring Break!  Back to the grindstone in the morning ... 

 

Penzance to London

Penzance dawn, with seagulls.  Our Cornish daffodils (and there are jars and vases of them all over the little hotel) had come out a bit further.

And then a long rail journey back to London.  The advantages of being Aged include being able to purchase a UK senior railcard, and so it becomes ridiculously cheap to travel first class.  On GWR - Great Western Railways - this certainly gives one a bit more leg room, and some free ... water.  Sandwiches? Not on a Saturday.  "Please could I have some sea salt flavoured crisps?" "You have to pay extra for those.  You can have ordinary salted ones."  Sigh.

This, however, is the lovely view from our London room.  Only the Piccadilly line is closed tomorrow (so that they can introduce 92 new trains), so it'll have to be be a cab to Heathrow ...