two milestones ...

Well, of course, one of them is Gramsci's first birthday - and what a difference a year makes!  (or, to be exact, a year minus nine weeks, for who knows where he was born, and the date of his birth is at best an estimate - but it's about now, and why not the Cinco de Mayo?).  But this is his shelter photo - the photo that made us get in the car and drive full-tilt to Santa Fe Animal Shelter to see whether he was still available, and if he was quite as adorable as this suggested.  Of course he was (despite the teeth).  He's growing into a very handsome feline indeed - as he transitions out of kittenhood.  Today is his first official day as a Cat.

But by chance, it's also a very different anniversary: this is the 5,000nd posting in Forms Traced by Light - the daily blog I started in very early 2009, and somehow, I've not missed a day since (just a handful of day-late postings early on, when I was somewhere with iffy wi-fi).  It's remained a daily practice of taking a photograph (or several - though the original idea was just one per day), and writing - sometimes, to be sure, a bland sentence or two; occasionally something more ambitious; usually something in the middle.  It's also intended, usually, to be something of a respite, a stand-aside for a moment from the world (so there's almost nothing about the events that crowd into my anxious mind right now, whether these be the New Mexican fires, or the Supreme Court, or Ukraine, or even the fact that as I type this I'm listening to the UK local election results coming in; nor of course about the many graduate exams and defenses that I have in the next week; and so on ...); and I try not to trample on other people's privacy; and - well, I'm sure that you can fill in efficiently all the ways in which this is not a diary (although, by now, it functions for me as a very useful aide-memoire).  I used to set myself time limits - "I'll stop at the end of this year ... at the end of five years ... at the end of ten years ..." - but haven't, yet, been able to stop.  So on I expect I'll go ... Thank you, all of you, for bothering to click on the link (or you wouldn't be reading this!) - it means a lot to know that you're out there!