the other redbud tree

... is situated right outside my office's side window, together with the rather nasty green fence that our neighbor has inexplicably put up all the length of her boundary. It's not as though she has a dog ... I guess, though, it's some kind of visual symbol of a desire for privacy.  On the right, and currently on the ground, you'll see a bas relief sculpture that used to be in the garden at 20.  Like so many things, it looks very much smaller here ... but I love seeing it as I come down the stairs and into the room.

Expect these plants to grow and grow very soon: we had another inch or so of rain last night.

 

rainy lemons

It did, indeed, rain hard in the night (and the bottom section of the drainpipe fell off with a satisfyingly resounding sound at 2.46 a.m.) - and there may be some more on the way.  The new ferns look as happy as if they were in a tropical rain forest; the lemons - well, they're wet.  

weather coming in

There's another storm on its way - the last of the winter?  Late afternoon saw us trying to reposition a detached gutter downspout (Alice had better luck with that than I, but it still seems rather precarious ...), and sandbagging the garage once again.  I'm just hoping that it holds off until the end of the Dodgers game ...

I always tell people that I park my car on the roof of the parking structure so that I can remember where I left it, and there's some truth in that.  But really I head up there so that I can admire the sky.

 

celebrating (but lamenting) a retirement

We went out for an evening walk just now, and all along Effingham - the street below us - were balloons and hand-made notices.  And as soon as we saw that very many of them featured mailboxes, and thanks for the delivery of parcels, and so on, we realised the sad truth: our mail man is retiring.  He's been terrific ever since we got here - he knows who we are (no small thing, because the temporary replacements of course never do), and is super alert to "hold" notices when we go out of town, and is always - always! - cheerful.  So I hope he enjoys a wonderful retirement.  Meng, incidentally, is a Chinese name which apparently translates as "energetic" - feel free to put me right here! - although in ancient Chinese signifies the first born of a concubine.  I'll stick with the first meaning since it suits him so extraordinarily well.

 

pastel protest

Opposite the reservoir.  You have to get up close (in the photo, in real life) to see that what's chalked on the garage door is "Free Palestine."  I can hardly be the only person who walks by and is immediately led to think of all the chalking on garage doors that children in Palestine can't even remotely think of doing right now: the message works not just through its words, but through the mode of production that brought it into being.

 

stoat

It's good to have the stoat out again.  He was always in the centre of the mantelpiece at 20 Hillside - and certainly a presence before that, I'm sure.  I've always been very fond of him - technically an ermine, I suppose, since it's a stoat in his white winter coat.

But.  I always thought he was a Staffordshire figure - certainly, the pose on a little grassy outcrop is very much in mid-nineteenth century (let's say 1840s) style - a popular ornament for a cottage chimney piece.  I thought I'd better check underneath, though.  The inscription reads "Beswick" - and a quick online search reveals that, modeled by Arthur Gredington (who modeled most of the horses and cattle for which the firm was mostly known - indeed, I had a Beswick china horse or two), he dates from between 1945-1963.  I'm pretty certain he must come from the earlier part of that, and was probably found in a junk shop - with a broken tail, because like so many of the cracked, chipped, damaged objects that characterized the antiques (or in this case "antiques"... ) at 20, he was lovingly repaired - albeit with a tail that curls underneath him, rather than out at the back.  I guess my father didn't, of course, have the benefit of Google to see what the original tail position would have been.

Did my parents think he was Staffordshire, and Victorian?  Did I just assume this, because of some of the china company he kept?  I still am very attached to the piece, but of course I'm now seeing it, in historical terms, very differently - a case of very long-standing assumptions and associations having been rewritten by research.

 

redbud

We have two (new, of course ...) redbud trees - which are just coming into flower.  And that's the garden bulletin for today ...

 

sunset on clouds

 

Our house faces north and east - it doesn't, therefore, get sunsets (although we see some spectacular dawns - it's lucky that we're early risers).  This may be its only real flaw ... But occasionally, someone else's spectacular sunset bounces off the clouds - this was the view from the bedroom this evening ... after a day with thunderstorms and rain.

Moth ...

... would like you to know that it was unreasonably (in her view) cold and wet this morning, and that I was ten minutes late in delivering her dinner.

the first rose of ...

... the first rose of summer doesn't seem quite right - it gets decidedly chilly at night, and it's due to rain tomorrow.  But I was delighted to see that The Poet's Wife - a David Austin rose - had come out today: it seems, at the very least, like a harbinger (and also, for all I go on and on about the wonders of lemon trees, it is a very unmistakably English rose).

 

lemon tree at night

Obviously I'm still obsessed with her ... even if it's hard to get the camera lighting right: the iPhone will persist in correcting the exposure and refusing the dark.  It was another very, very long day.  May I recommend two slices of lemon (actually from a fruit that fell off during transportation) in one's glass of medicinal vodka?

 

our lemon tree!

We have a lemon tree!  I can't tell you how happy and excited this makes me!  It's like being in the Mediterranean.  I realize that, yes, it's also like being in California, and that they aren't exactly a rarity in these parts - but it's something that is really a British dream come true.  And yes, there's a lime tree, too; and a bay tree (mind you, there was one of those at 20 Hillside), and there's an orange tree on its way.  And there's thyme and oregano planted around its base.  The deck is nearly there ...

 

surprise treats

A long, long day - but one with perks!  One of my undergraduates asked permission, before Spring Break, to miss the class before break because he was going to Japan.  Of course! I said - but only if you bring me back some sweet chestnuts.  I was half joking - but he found me these in a 7-11 (a wonderfully useful store, in that country), and I was ever so happy.  And then - it's recruitment day - or rather days - for our prospective graduate students, when we try and woo the people to whom we've made offers - and one of them, from Colombia, brought gifts of chocolate and jam.  The prospectives came to my graduate class (on the Botanical Empire) this afternoon - let's hope I see them again in the fall!

 

orchid

One of Alice's (many) orchids, looking happy and healthy in the morning sun.  Since in my British Art and Empire grad class tomorrow we're discussing The Botanical Empire, and since I've been preparing that all day (well, when not inverted in the dentist's chair, or doing undergraduate grading), this seems a highly suitable image.  

creek, coffee, view

I swear I always feel more wrung out when we return from New Mexico on I-10 rather than I-40/15, but we're back!  The cats, despite excellent care in our absence, are delighted to see us.  

Here's the view of Oak Creek from our room this morning - flowing decidedly more fully than yesterday; the interior of Oak Creek Expresso, purveyors of excellent coffee and muffins; and a view from our first rest stop, somewhere on the wild mountains above Phoenix.

 

on the road

On the road ... back to LA, via Sedona.  Top - between Winslow and Flagstaff (where for a quarter of an hour it started to snow, which - since I was driving - I could have done without ... ) and then below, from our room overlooking Oak Creek, just before dinner with friends from LA/New Haven - whom we discovered would be staying at the same hotel as us, which is decidedly a weird coincidence.  My father, who delighted in coincidences, would have approved ... Beautiful skies all the way; weather a bit of a gamble; can't wait to see Moth and Gramsci tomorrow ...

 

Eldorado windmill (and a baking PSA)

On a suitably blowy day, I at last remembered to take round the homeowners' association fees to the Eldorado Community Improvement Association's offices - not quite late.  It's a mystery why the buildings here - I have my back to them - are built in Kansas ranch mode, and aren't remotely Northern New Mexican.  As it is, the photo, in its black and white form, could have been taken at any time in the last hundred years, almost anywhere in the West.  Or maybe not - when did parking spaces start to be designated with lines?

The windmill doesn't seem to rotate - or it would have been spinning wildly.  We've been weather forecast gazing all day - we haven't left for lower land, yet, though we were tempted, for the assurance that we'd be able to get out - let's hope it doesn't snow too much in the night.  One can never tell, in Eldorado.

And I made some excellent maple syrup flapjacks for the road.  Only ... somehow I have never realized that wax paper isn't parchment paper, and in a hot oven, it melts and sticks.  Oh.  So I chilled them, and have been scraping them off, and now have a very tasty bag full of granola ...

 

railrunner views

I so love taking the Rail Runner up or down from Albuquerque - one has much more of a sense of the northern New Mexico landscape passing through it, and especially going through several pueblos - Katishtya/San Felipe, Kewa/Santo Domingo - as opposed to whizzing along on the busy interstate.  It was super-busy when I took the rental car back this morning - and then extremely calming taking the (free!) Albuquerque #50 bus to the station, and the $4 ride up to Santa Fe, past all the wintry cotton trees that border the fertile land around the Rio Grande. I was delighted to see so many acequias - very long-standing community ditches - filled with water, and doing their irrigation work.  I actually wanted one of the new acequia-themed number plates for my new car, but I think it requires a bit of an effort to obtain that ...

 

spring weather

The best that can be said of it is that it's uncertain.  We keep anxiously scanning the weather forecast to see what it might be doing on Saturday, when we're due to leave, and trying to work out if it would be better to depart on Friday - even if we don't want to.  I went on two walks today - deceptively potentially sunny, but with a vicious wind when one turned in one direction.  And that's not counting the dramatic hail storm (when we were snug inside).

 

a (very belated) celebration

A dinner tonight at Geronimo's, to celebrate Alice's book contract with OUP.  This was meant to have happened back in very early January, but we canceled because I thought that I'd still be testing positive for Covid (even though that in fact disappeared very quickly indeed).  Anyway - here we were, and Canyon Road was its usual magical nighttime self, and the experience wasn't too triggering of the last time that we were there, which was to pick up Thanksgiving Dinner in 2020, everyone standing in isolated terror in the freezing cold road, waiting for our bags of food to appear ... 

I was too captivated by the excellence of the food to take photos of it, but believe me, it was beautiful as well as exceptionally tasty.  And that's a cocktail with vodka and cucumber and lime and smoked salt, since you were wondering.

 

sheaf (and a Photoshop experiment)

 

This morning, the sunlight was hitting this sheaf of corn and garlic stems - a rural decoration that's been here for an age, and, when I originally bought it at the farmers' market, had a whole lot of very viable fat Purple Russian garlic bulbs at the bottom - they're still there, but dessicated.

When I looked at the photo I'd taken, I'd not managed to avoid the ugly (from a photographic point of view) central heating thermostat on the wall.  So I thought I'd perform a rare - for me - manipulation, and remove it.  And then ... I decided, instead, to use (for the first time) Photoshop's generative AI tool.  And lo and behold - there's a new, discreet, electrical feature on the wall.  AI doesn't quite get the perspective right - and now I wonder: was this the tool that Kate Middleton was playing with?  Or what?  The degrees, the subtle degrees of manipulation in the latest Mothering Sunday photo of KM and the royal children actually betrays a great deal of small scale fiddling around - so much so that I very much wish I was teaching a photo-history-and-theory course right now, and could bring it in as an object lesson ...

cheese scones

made with green chile (and a pinch of chipotle powder) - in the running, surely, to be one of my favorite foods.  They are also something that aren't at all temperamental when one bakes them at altitude.  So it's a good job that I went out for an energetic walk before settling down to watch the Oscars ...

 

a drive

This morning, I bought a new car - having been without one, and borrowing Alice's, for four months, for which I've been hugely grateful.  And this afternoon, I took the car for a drive on my favorite road, through Pecos and up to Terrero (the general stores, there - which used to feed thousands of humming birds in the summer - is now, very sadly, permanently closed - it never recovered from Covid, and the shutting down of the campgrounds, and then the further closures because of fires).  After Terrero, and up to Cowles, the road was clearly snow-covered, so we turned round.  So the car has now performed on winding roads as well as on the freeway, and is wonderful ... cars have come a Long Way since my last purchase in 2007 ...

 

"spring" break

The sky didn't look especially propitious as we landed in Albuquerque; and although we managed to dodge the worst of the weather on the way up to Eldorado, this was the view from our driveway this afternoon - and yes, afternoon, not evening.  I think that by now, it's about to snow ...

 

drive home

Yes, another one!  But this one was relatively short lived, if unexpected.  And its cloudy drama offered the opportunity to record a very typical angle of my commute-drive home, as one comes up Benton Way, ready to turn left on Sunset ...

 

vases, waiting

A window, on campus - with a set of flower-filled vases waiting for - for what?  To grace tables?  To be presented to worthy recipients?  An unanswered mystery.

 

pedestrians (and voting)

T

Atypically, I drove to USC this morning down Vermont - having dropped Alice and her voting papers off on Hillhurst - and, stationery at the lights, saw this billboard: IN 2022, MORE PEDESTRIANS DIED ON VERMONT AVE  THAN IN THE STATE OF VERMONT. Vote YES on HLA for Safe Streets.  [The HLA measure, for those of you who don't live in LA, is to approve (or not) the construction of hundreds of more miles of bus lanes and bike lanes - when I last checked, it looks as though it's easily passing].

I took the photo to use when opening our American Art class today in the "Picturing Democracy" course, which was - with deliberate timing - on Elections, and on the importance of visual culture in relation to them - starting, as one student pointed out, to the little white figure, which is what one looks for if one wants to cross; but quickly moving to the significance of yellow and black; the prevalence of unhoused people on Vermont, not to mention windshield washers and jugglers; the increase of pedestrians in 2022 as a result of Covid (well, maybe); and the likelihood of running over someone while distracted by a billboard ... it was one way into unpacking Thomas Nast cartoons; Thomas Waterman Wood's American Citizens painting and, (via Ellery Foutch's brilliant article on the topic), the visual semiotics of glass ballot bowls.  It was a fun class ... (and I even had a student emailing me later to reassure me that she'd gone a dropped off her ballot paper straight afterwards).

 

lunar new year (still)

Since there are one or two houses in the neighborhood that still have Hallowe'en decorations up, the vestiges of Lunar New Year adornments is hardly remarkable.  Actually, the 'hood is a veritable forest of new plants, which are being planted in front of just-bought houses; just-renovated/flipped houses, and so on.  'Tis the season.

 

leading into the park

It's very much my aim to have our back yard looking as though it leads invitingly into Griffith Park, even if there's a wire fence between the two (complete with a large opening for critters to crawl through. I think we're getting there.  And any time soon, if it ever warms up, those plants should start to grow - as it is, in the rain, its native odiferousness is very much - well, hardly on display, but certainly very available to the nostrils.

 

a wet day conferencing

A very wet day at the Huntington - we splashed over from the conference room to the American Art Gallery to see photographs by Mercedes Dorame and Cara Romero - both of them indigenous artists - in the sprawling Borderlands show.  This big bird - and some avian friends - turn out to be part of the show, too (they're migratory), and are by my USC colleague Enrique Celaya - though I've only found that out just now when checking on Mercedes' second name ...  Cara Romero spoke really interestingly in the conference itself about her practice: a member of the Chemehuevi tribe (much of whose ancestral lands are beneath Lake Havasu), she lives both in the Mojave and in Santa Fe - which explains why one of the images she showed was disconcertingly familiar to me: a print used to hang in the hair salon I went to there pre-pandemic ...

The grounds were looking good, too.  There are, I promise, mountains behind here.

 

lurking in the gloom

At the Huntington for a conference - on Ecologies of Photography - all day today - and then coming away from some excellent papers to find that it's getting very dark.  By now, of course, it's raining ...