London summer

I don't think I've ever flown in LHR and seen everything look so yellow and dry: I might as well have been landing in Abu Dhabi.  it was 94 degrees when I landed. This, of course, meant that the Tube was working, or not working, rather shakily: the points at Acton Town had failed, and this meant a good deal of complicated navigation (I was glad I'd downloaded Mooveit in Buenos Aires). Yes - I know they have taxis here, but the last time I took one to where I'm staying the driver - to my mind wilfully - went to a very wrong address, and refused to take anything off the bill.  However - here I am - having dinner overlooking the Thames (a gulp of time off from picture permissions, etc).

 

greetings from DFW

Hello, England: I'm on my way ... I wish that meant that my book was entirely trim and tidy and all loose ends tied up, but with luck (read: a very full day in the British Library on Thursday and maybe Friday - which isn't quite what I'd planned, but there you go) it will be send off to the U of Chicago Press on time, and I'll be able to breathe fresh air by the weekend.   Today brought very large hail as I drove (and pulled over, and drove again) down to Albuquerque; a ground stop of American Airlines planes as their computer system briefly went down; and dealing with stray bits of grad studies stuff, undergrads wanting letters of recommendation for law school, and the rest of it, in interstices ...

 

evening clouds

Pretty!  Of course, it says everything about the day that I'm casting around for something to take a picture of, and that isn't my desktop, as the sun is going down.  A hard-working day, largely on the book - so much busywork!  I'm making progress, but I'll need every last moment to check everything is in place.  But I do want to note the generosity of certain (famous) artists, who make things so much easier ...

 

if in doubt, roast

While Alice was out of town (safely retrieved from Santa Fe Airport this evening), I tried to eat up various things in the fridge.  Happily not everything went into a terribly mistimed vegetable stew last night - so inedible that dinner turned into chips and salsa - I roasted some aubergines and some red peppers this morning.  In the way of much roasted vegetables, they shrank, but were at least tasty.  Or, think of it this way - my mind has been swallowed by picture permissions and captions.

 

breakfast

Unposed, unpremeditated - or I'm sure I'd have removed the old base of a table lamp, which we use as a paper weight, a table-cloth weight, a weight for whatever we need to keep in place.  But it was such a pretty morning ... I was grabbing a few moments of it before retreating for another long day on The Book.  Moving along ...

 

ABQ and back

This is such a quintessential New Mexican view ... I took Alice down to the airport in Albuquerque this morning, before doing a final hunt-down of footnotes in UNM library - which has a top-class Fine Arts Library and, I must say, a top-class Fine Art librarian, Aaron Blecha, who helped me to track down something that has taken me an age to locate (a reference in Archibald Robertson's 1802 Elements of the Graphic Arts, the first drawing manual to be published in the US: for some reason, UNM had, WorldCat told me, an e-version of it.  And, eventually, it emerged, from the depths of their system).  It's one of my favorite libraries to work in, and I polished off the other fns, too, before driving back down Central - the old Route 66.  It's change a huge amount in the last 30 years - in the last 10, indeed - many new blocks of housing; vacant (and bulldozed) lots; endless cannabis stores ... But there are still a few of the old Route 66 motels standing;

and some re-purposed signs to give a sense of the past ...

Then back up the 14; 42 to Galisteo - half way along I took the top picture - and I just made it home before the heavens opened and huge hailstones started to hurl down.

 

not a hosepipe

Isn't he handsome?  This is about five foot of Red Racer, who was hanging out by the front of our house today, and doubtless slithered off fast (they are not called "racers" for nothing) to decimate some pack rats or mice or lizards or anything else that they can find down the many holes and burrows.  S/he isn't dangerous - in that they aren't venemous, though apparently can deliver a "nasty bite" is cornered (or if you're a pack rat) because they have very sharp teeth.  We are delighted to have such a spectacularly colored and scaled rodent operative.