2023 fades out

The last light of 2023.  Yes, I know I posted about sunsets yesterday, and these are in the danger range of turning into New Mexico stock images ... but I always post the fading of the year on its last evening.  I'm never truly sorry to say goodbye to a year - but 2023 was, all things considered, more stress than pleasure (and ending it with Covid, even, happily, in the mildest of versions, was the final kick in the teeth).  But we did, at dinner, and over a bottle of fizz, extract all the good things that we could about the year that's waning away.  All the same, I'll be glad to hang up the new calendar tomorrow.  Before then - Happy New Year, everyone! - and thank you, so much, all of you who read this, and keep me faithful to my daily practice ...

 

stages of a wintry sunset

It was a good one tonight, starting dull and sultry when we were on our evening walk, and then deepening into a John Martin apocalyptic red before fading into dark smoky wisps of cirrus clouds.

 

on living in a (very) foreign country

I had to send off some forms today - the administration of my father's estate still isn't complete.  After I'd dealt with the fact that my hapless lawyer in England had spelt one of my first names wrong, for the second time (last time he tried Janet; this time Jannet - it's actually Jennet, which may be a ridiculously odd name, but that's another story.  He should be able to read a copy of my passport (or of Ray's will, for that matter) - Photoshop is my best friend - and he'd mangled another form, too, which I had to correct - I was ready to despatch them.  Alice tried first - the FedEx pick-up in Eldorado wouldn't take anything international.  So I drove into town - A had already been out twice - to the main office.

"Please can I send this to England?  Sorry, it's a rather complicated address."  [the hapless lawyer lives in the depths of the countryside, now - of course, when I hired him, on the bereaved basis of him having been my father's lawyer, without doing due diligence, I thought he was still in Wimbledon.]

young man behind counter takes sheet of paper with address written on it

"New England?"

"No, England."

"Does New England have FedEx?"

"No, it's not New England.  England - er, Old England.  The real England.  And yes, it does have FedEx."

"So - New England ..."

"No - no Nueva Inglaterra - Inglaterra - Gran Bretaña"

"Ah, sí - Gran Bretaña"

Young man manages to type in address, which looks ok.  Puts my ten sheets of paper into a FedEx envelope.

"What you sending?"

"Papers!  ¡Documentos!"

Another long pause, while he types in the contents onto the FedEx form.  This reads "Patterns, paper.  For the making of clothes..." I'm asked to sign ...

"This doesn't seem quite right.  These are - well, legal documents."

"I put in "paper" and that's what it said"

We both laugh ... I give up, pay $88.40, and leave ...

OK - so I'm used to people not in New Mexico dropping the "New," and saying (especially, indeed, if people are in England) "So!  You're off to Mexico!" and my having to correct them, gently.  But this was a first.

And yes, I was of course wearing a mask through all of this, which may not have aided communication.  But.  

On the topic of Masks, am feeling perfectly fine, thank you ...

 

A burrito

Do cats realize how completely ridiculous they sometimes look?  Here's Grammy in one of his more absurd poses.

I was very very grateful this evening that Alice - who went out for lunch with friends - brought me back an excellent burrito from the Plaza Cafe.  My thanks to everyone for their kind and concerned thoughts yesterday, when I really did feel pretty washed out and dreadful, and couldn't stop coughing and blowing my nose.  Etc.  Today - pretty much back to normal, apart from sneezing a couple of times, and full of energy.  So let's hope I don't relapse in some Covid-perverse way, and that I test negative before long, and don't have to exist in masked quarantine;p['''''''''

"""""""""""""""""""''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''']| - sorry, that really was Gramsci's unedited contribution - and that I can rejoin the world. Currently, I feel like a fraud - that is, when I'm not celebrating the efficacy of vaccines and boosters.

 

from my desk

Believe me, after the Dental Debacle that started winter break, I had plenty of stuff to do - especially given that we only have ten days left.  So my plans emphatically did not include getting Covid ... I was a bit suspicious yesterday, but gave the benefit of the doubt to such things as Altitude and Dry Air, but by this morning there was no question that Something Was Up.  I'll spare you the details, but I feel decidedly washed out.  Off to sleep on the sitting room sofa (not an act of martyrdom - it's very comfortable) - it would be wonderful if through distancing and mask wearing I can spare Alice, but that's probably more than a little optimistic.

 

sunset, moonrise

Ninety seconds apart; a one-hundred-and-eighty turn.  In the top image, you can see that I never took down the humming bird feeder from the summer; in the bottom, chamisa stalks against the rising full moon.

I seem to make a yearly rant - when I'm in the US - about the fact that Boxing Day isn't a Thing, here.  But we did go for a walk ... in true traditional fashion - and it was very, very cold.

 

Christmas 2023

In which the moon tries hard to outshine our neighbors' completely over the top Christmas lights (you can't see them flashing, here); 

Moth discovers which parcel contains the catnip bananas;

and Gramsci appears to be sleeping off his Christmas dinner.

 

Christmas Eve

Not quite a White Christmas where we are ... but with 250 feet or so of elevation more, when we drove into town to do our food shopping this morning, it was stunningly wintry (and the temperature is already down to 26 this evening, so chilly - I just walked down the driveway to pick up the very very last-arriving Christmas delivery from the mailbox - some high-quality catnip goodies for Moth and Grams - and one could really feel it).  Happy Christmas to everyone!

 

the vet said WHAT?

That one of us had to lose weight and that the other one had to be careful not to put any more on?  Moth is looking a little coy; Gramsci indignant - but what's truly worthy of note is that true solidarity has been achieved around this mandate.  They are sitting, meaningfully, on top of their kibble container.

 

perhaps the world's most crooked Christmas tree?

This may be the tree's best angle.  It certainly has many worse ...  So: I congratulated myself on my efficiency this year, and ordered our tree way in advance, from Adam and Kim who annually sell them up at La Tienda in Eldorado - and ordered it to be delivered, too.  Only ... we were delayed a week by my teeth, and so I arranged with Adam for it to be brought round yesterday, when they were closing down for the season. It's a challenge.  Was it the last one of its type left on the lot, rejected by others?  It - bends in different directions.  So if you put it straight up in its holder, it then shoots off in one direction, and then sharply angles back on itself.  But if you angle it in the holder, then the deviation later on is even worse.  I spent a long time puzzling with this one, and in the end gave in to its idiosyncrasies, and it definitely looks as though it has a major, and very inebriated tilt.

As you can see, Moth is wandering past, indifferent.  It's Gramsci's first indoor tree, and I was expecting him to be excited - especially since it's covered in an aviary's worth of little red birds.  I've left off all glass baubles, in an excess of caution.  But apart from a moment's surprise - "you've brought a tree indoors?" - he's barely given it a glance, and if he registers it at all, prefers to gaze at the reflection of the lights in the window.

 

ready for the holidays

Gramsci is, anyway - speaking for myself, I'm about ten days off.  This is supposedly Moth's Swiss Ski Chalet, a construction of quite remarkable cardboard kitschiness, which she had for a few years and then seemed to disdain - but we disinterred it from the depths of the garage.  She's still pretending it doesn't exist. Grammy, on the other hand, has rather taken to it.  Today was Vet Check-up Day for both of them (all well, though Moth was told to lose weight, and our long-held suspicion that Grams has problems jumping was confirmed, in that he just doesn't seem to have much muscle on his hind legs, even though the bone structure is fine).  Perhaps he should take up ski-ing?

 

a couple of (camouflaged) neighbors

We got here!  All of today was driving in the rain - we were grateful it wasn't snow - so we were delighted to pull up, and charge up the heating, and pull up the blinds, and - well, here are two coyotes roaming around outside, looking fit and furry against the elements.  Gramsci saw them through the window, from the top of his kitty palace, and rightly regarded them with horror.  He and Moth seem as happy to be back as we are ...

 

on the road (at last)

Off we went - on a wet and stormy day, but we made it to Winslow in time for dinner (and yes! even my poor mangled mouth managed La Posada's wonderful corn and black bean soup, and the soft bits of the vegetable platter...).  First image is looking towards San Bernardino - in pride of place since it's my favorite of the day - (it really demands being blown up large ...); second is maybe Eagle Rock - very early after getting on the freeway; then a rest area somewhere between Barstow and Needles, just before we were stuck in a long long long traffic jam because people were hauling an overturned truck out of the way, and then, eventually, Alice pushing the cart of kitties and their necessities and our overnight stuff into the hotel, which, as ever, is spectacular in its Christmas illuminations ... Moth and Gramsci slept the entire way.  I suspect we're for a lively night.

 

strange sparkles in the view

My dentist's - or, let's be more accurate, oral surgeon's - office has a most wonderful view - today, one could see the first of two storms starting to roll in.  Those golden specks aren't some strange meteorological phenomenon, however, but the reflection of lots of little gold lights that are hanging round their Christmas tree.  This was some considerable consolation for another visit today (but I was cleared to travel!  That's good!).

 

a traveling Napoleon

Napoleon has emerged from the garage, after his transatlantic voyage, and is now on the windowsill of the bathroom that's adjacent to my study.  For years, he sat on my mother's desk (still in the garage) in Wimbledon, and before that he was in Lyndene, on Station Road, Ossett (in Yorkshire), until my Auntie Jess (really my Great Auntie Jess) died.  And before that - Auntie Jess was given him, as a present, by the French family with whom she stayed in the 1900s, I should think - well before WW1: she'd gone to France (probably between leaving school and becoming a teacher?) to practice her French.  I find it hard to imagine what it was like carrying him back - I presume by train, and then the Calais-Dover boat, and then a train to London, and then probably getting the Tube - maybe a cab? - between Victoria Station (I think that's where the trains for the ferry left from?) and St Pancras, and then catching - maybe the Flying Scotsman - from St Pancras to Leeds, and then the local train to Ossett.  And then explaining him to her family ... 

 

the last of the year?

The very last chrysanthemum, I suspect, at least.  I actually bought the pot of them as a USC-themed joke, because they were unarguably cardinal and gold - but they showed more staying power than our football team, in the end.  And we welcomed their cheer, today: Alice was an ailing heap following her first shingles vaccine, and I'm - well, facing up to the realities of no solid food - that is, food that needs chewing - for months and months (I can hardly take a blender into restaurants, so I anxiously scan menus for soups and soufflés and refried beans ...).  Wine, happily, is not solid.  However, the pain has disappeared, I think ...

 

channeling his inner Benjamin Button

That's a reference that will only make sense, of course, if you saw the Time magazine cover featuring a handsome shoulder-cat named Benjamin Button, who was draped around some singer or the other who's the Time person of the year.  BB is actually a rag doll cat, so much floppier than our Gramsci, but the principle is very much the same (even though Grams doesn't have a personalized carrier and backpack carrier to accompany him when he travels in his human's private jet, together with his two Scottish Fold siblings).

Now back to reading graduate admission applications.

 

in his tunnel

Gramsci loves his tunnel.  He can hide in it and jump out at an unsuspecting Moth; or he can simply sit in it, as here, and look beautiful.  This is, however, also a photo that shows off to perfection the extraordinary untidiness of his whiskers.

It doesn't show his teeth.  Grammy has the most remarkable long, healthy teeth.  I am jealous.  (I will spare you a detailed update on the state of my mouth ... but I will have to eat soft foods only for - oh, I don't know - months and months and months. This does not make me happy).

 

dismal

That would be a reasonable word to use to describe the sky outside our house this morning.  It's certainly adequate to describe my state of mind after what proved to be three hours of uncomfortable emergency dental surgery.  Normal service will, I hope, be resumed tomorrow - I'm in too much pain (despite strong painkillers) tonight.  
 

my workplace

USC being USC, from time to time one finds that one's actually working on a movie set.  Whatever they're shooting, it was a large scale production - with lots of extras (students, presumably, despite it being finals week.  Or for all I know, they were getting credit for riding their skateboards across the line of the camera.  I can't find out on line what the movie might be - happy to be enlightened).

But here's a question: how long will this filming last?  Because on Thursday, there's a large and serious Active Shooter Drill being held (a good reason to stay away from campus).  Or maybe, it being USC, it'll all be integrated ...

 

fiery

Yes! I made it to the Huntington today, which felt like a major triumph - first to a meeting, this morning, and then this afternoon to read some books about the nineteenth century tanning industry in the Hudson Valley (which laid waste, it's estimated, to some 12,000 acres of hemlocks - hemlock bark was used in the tanning process, which was big - cattle hides were imported from as far afield as South America).  These red hot pokers (Kniphofia - native to South Africa, so they won't, I guess, be making an appearance in our back yard) are outside the library door.

But more extraordinary, and even more fiery red, was the sudden apparition at lunchtime of an ambulance, a large fire truck, and a police car, all making their way towards the cactus garden (or at least in that direction), at a speed more or less compatible with urgency while trying not to run anyone over.  No sight nor smell of fire or smoke (and nothing in the news).  No idea ... but it was unusually dramatic for the location.

 

Christmas, Los Angeles style

Really, I do live in an absurd, if wonderful city ... this is down on the Venice canals, on a gloriously warm and sunny day.  Maybe it's not quite as incongruous as the time that I went to Hawai'i a few weeks before Christmas, which was the first occasion that I'd ever seen Christmas decorations and palm trees, but it's pushing it very close. It's probably a good job that this year's Christmas card is already done and printed, or this would be a very tempting image to have used ...

honeysuckle

The plants continue to be planted ... and some of the latest to go in are a row of honeysuckle plants along the fence, which are destined to grow up it ... This isn't actually a Native Californian honeysuckle - there's one of those in the middle of the row of five, however - it's precisely the same kind of honeysuckle, so far as I can tell (and so far as I can smell) as I grew up with in Wimbledon.  The difference, of course, is that it's mid-December, and it's still happily blooming.

Who knows when the garden will truly be complete ...?  We were first told by Thanksgiving, and then next Tuesday, and now ... well, my guess is by the end of next week, apart from some final bits of steps and stuccoing.  A bulletin will be posted ... 

 

carniverous plants

I was walking onto campus past the Music School this morning, and saw a sign in a window.  I'm never one to walk past a sign.  This one was below a terrarium and some loose plants, and informed us that they are carniverous, and free to a good home, and "give them lots of sun and some distilled water and they will be very happy." Somewhat incongruously, I feel, they've been raised and nurtured by the orchestra manager.

But - would one feel guilty not feeding them little bits of meat?  Or propelling flies or ants in their direction?  I find that some of the biggest eat lizards and small mammals, which is a little scary - no wonder the Victorians developed a genre of man-eating plants stories.  Would they like some turkey for Christmas?  I didn't really feel tempted.

 

paper-white

Rather too much of today was spent in one form of dental treatment or another - none of it comfortable, and I probably won't be able - ok, I won't be able to eat - solid food again until next Wednesday.  English teeth - just as much of a disaster area as legend would have it.  But at least - getting up early to drive to Beverley Hills and Santa Monica (and yes, I do have dentists who are the far end of town, but they're good) - at least, I got to see this paper-white narcissus when it had just bloomed, on the kitchen window sill.

 

back on campus

It felt good to be back on campus - which probably had less to do with the fact of chairing a department meeting than it did with the sunny weather, and the temperature of 74 degrees (that's about 23 degrees, in Centigrade).  Perfect.  And I managed to go and see the Kara Walker exhibition in the campus art gallery before it closed, too - I'll confess to finding her a bit same-y, in terms of her themes and thought, but amazing in her techniques.  And by that, I don't mean her trademark silhouetting of exaggerated racial stereotypes (that's what I mean about the same-y ness), but the range of print methods that she deploys - etching, and lithography, and linocuts, and aquatints, and screen print, and sugar lift, and spit bite (which sounds disgusting, but it's where you don't put the etched plate in an acid bath, but apply the acid by brush), and drypoint - she has an incredible amount of versatility and talent, and I think I spent more time looking at the close-up textures than I did considering the thematics.

 

a long day ...

... which began very much pre-dawn in Oxford, catching a bus to LHR in the rain, and after an airborne interlude, moved on to the Art History holiday party at the LA Athletic Club, in a room that used to be home to an illicit speakeasy, and with a barman who made extraordinarily good cocktails ... although exhaustion caught up with me after a couple of hours.

I can't believe I have to get up to chair a department meeting in the morning...

 

Victorian Colour

The Victorian Colour Revolution show at the Ashmolean was very worth while - from the sombre black of Queen Victoria's mourning dress, to Turner's palette (and he seems to have had as many pairs of glasses as I do, though kept much more tidily);

to colour swatches of artificially dyed wools;

to some very bright coloured socks;

to bright red underwear - who knew!

Then there were a good range of weird things - what is this tabby doing to a rabbit, or hare, on the side of William Burges' wonderful Great Bookcase?

Then there's the magnificent porcelain Minton peacock;

the Tinted Venus - reminding the Victorians of the crucial fact that classical marble sculptures would have been painted (Elizabeth Barrett Browning found her rather too obscene for her liking);

an African entertainer clapping very energetically in Poynter's Israel in Egypt;

and a painting I just hadn't known, Henry Wyndham Phillips' portrait of the designer and design theorist Owen Jones, standing against the backdrop of the Alhambra Court that he created for the Crystal Palace.

Then I called on some old friends - I didn't remember the rushy pond in the foreground of Uccello's Hunt in the Forest.

I went looking for dandelions, and found a couple that I didn't remember - on the Burne-Jones big cupboard,

and Arthur Hughes' Home from Sea.

And finally, can I just point out that it was very, very wet in Oxford today.  Unpleasantly so.