pies

I'm not a big pie eater - or, if that sounds improbably puritanical, I'm not a big pastry easter: I will happily munch my way through the interior of any number of pies, sweet or savory.  But the array as we left Harry's this evening was extraordinarily impressive (the pie cupboard was being tidied out for the evening before these all go back to have a good night's sleep), and even I, despite being full of tinga de pollo tacos, was very tempted .. (no, I didn't succumb.  But it could have been a close call).

 

not the most picturesque of views

... but for the bevy of stucco-menders and layers; the carpenter; the painters; the handymen who have been passing through this place and who will continue to do so for the next few weeks, one imagines that it's a very welcome sight.

The people who may be less happy, however - or the person - would be the realtor selling the house on the left - now 52 days on the market, and its owners long ago having departed for Brooklyn.  Somehow the deliverers of this useful tiny edifice have deposited it in the sightline of just about the one window that doesn't look out into an overgrown tree ...

 

more rearrangement ...

The stuccoing, the mending, and the rest of it continues ... We've had to pull all the plant pots away from the house and the walls and into the middle of the yard - where they look quite good massed together, especially with the solar powered lights stuck in them (relocated from the edge of the terrace, so workers don't trample on them) ...

 

Zozobra week!

 

It's Zozobra week!  Old Man Gloom will go up in flames on Friday night in Fort Marcy Park (luckily a bear has descended from a tree there and ambled off), full of things that people want to get rid of written on little pieces of paper - bad things that they've said or done or thought (a bit like a confessional), or, let's say, the name of the president.  We won't, I think, be there (although I've always rather wanted to go) - but I'm happy to celebrate him in virtual form, here in a mural on the back of a closed dry cleaners on Cerrillos.  

September sky

Hard to believe that we've arrived at September, but when I went for a (literally) fast walk this evening, I could more or less tell myself that there was a faint sense of fall in the air.  Another way of putting it: it's time the Dodgers got their act together ...

 

rearrangement

The stucco work on the house began today - and the team managed to accomplish a good deal before a big storm struck.  We had to move plant pots, and furniture, and - well, everything, away from the house, which means we have this fetching little arrangement of chairs and table sitting as if we are about to take tea, or a margarita, overlooking the road, with a hint of sunset in the background.  The cats did not care for the power washing (nor did we).  And as a result of the storminess, we were without internet for about six hours, which was very far from a blessing when faced with various end-of-month deadlines: there's a limit to what one can do by way of tethering one's computer to the one-to-two fluctuating bars of reception that one gets on the sort-of grid out here.

 

Geometry of dining

To dinner with friends at La Paloma - an excellent Mexican (as opposed to New Mexican) restaurant in town - with a view from our table through to a private room/courtyard - everything looking poised for an evening ... though no one else ever arrived there.