alliums at night

And here they are, stretching away into the night in the front yard ... and remarkably challenging, I might add, to take a nighttime photo that does them any kind of justice, it turns out, once one's battled with the lights along the path to the front door, and the flash/no flash dilemma of one's iPhone (and yes, it would have been better to come inside and fetch a real camera, but I didn't), and so on.  But they are very beautiful ...

 

Moth

Moth would like you to know that she's been in charge today.  Yes, that's some kind of tabby and white cat down on the floor, chasing after the tapes on the seat cushions that we've brought in out of the storm, but she can't be bothered to take any notice of that.  As for us ... one week down, fourteen to go ...

still standing strong

They're still looking good!  Despite last night's storm (and yes, the hapless roof repairers were back at our neighbors again, today), they are resilient (more, I feel, than I am, after four days of the semester, and writing both a long promotion review and a long publishers' report over the last couple of these days ...).  

 

not your ordinary marigolds

I'm so happy to see these marigolds flower.  When I came out here in the late spring, I planted a little packet of English wildflower seeds - I don't think, I hope, that they will be causing invasive havoc to the barren Eldorado landscape (hmmm - that was probably the argument used against introducing English house sparrows into Central Park in the C19th ...).  Anyway ... this packet was one of the ones handed out at the end of my father's funeral, and so I wanted to give the contents a good chance.  Although other seeds have certainly sprouted and grown, I'm not sure that anything else will actually flower whilst we're here - but it's really great that something so cheerful has.

 

travel ...

Yes, I know it's the semester - but I have two course releases (so I'm not teaching this semester) and plan to be in New Mexico for another ten days or so ... so that I can try to write.  Actually, it'll largely be Zoom meetings, at this rate ... Today was one of those days of travel that was beyond fraught and complicated... I had to fly from Burbank because of complicated car logistics, which meant changing in Las Vegas, which I hate and loathe and detest ... not least because this time I heard the announcement, the last call for a flight leaving for Santa Fe - I didn't know there were such things from there.  

Two hours later - my flight to Albuquerque was a little bumpy ... monsoon clouds from the air ...

but I realized if I caught an (expensive) taxi to the Railrunner station, I could make the 4.22 train up to Santa Fe.  Hmmm.  That train was canceled - the down train to Belen had apparently been belching ominous clouds of black smoke, and never re-emerged (Alice couldn't come and collect, since she was supervising the slow, slow, slow replacement of our A/C).

Eventually a train appeared, an hour and a half late... View of the Sandias, looking like an ancient photo ...

and water tower - I could go on and on, since this is one of my favorite train rides, but by the time I was eventually home, I might just as well have got in the car and driven - it would only have taken an hour or so longer.

 

sitting outside - briefly

It's been a long, long day - and I haven't got done anything like what I should have got done - but I went and sat outside for ten minutes or so, which was the quietest and stillest I've been all day...

 

re-blooming

Before we left, I gave Wedgwood a hard prune - she was looking tired, with yellowing leaves, and seemed clearly spent for the season.  But ... she has sprung up again; grown several feet, and is happily producing a second round of very pretty blooms.  In other pruning news, I trimmed all the lavender, which, supposedly, should ensure a second bloom later in the year.  This was hardly a hardship (unlike giving Wedgwood a trim, since her thorns are vicious) - spending ten minutes swathed in lavender scent is a good way to spend some of one's morning.

 

morning coffee

... on the balcony!  It was good to be back, though of course missing Alice and Moth and Gramsci - on the other hand, easier to get things done (work, house things to sort out) when solo.... I missed, too, a spectacular-looking storm in Eldorado.  It's impossible to be in both places at once, though I'm doing my best ...

more balloons

As is: it's the start of the new semester.  These are decidedly less exuberant than all those Convention balloons in Chicago (although the crepe myrtle behind them is putting on a good show).  I feel that al lot of today can be summed up by an incident at our Welcome Back breakfast: I picked up a glass to tap with a fork in order to bring the room to some kind of quietness, ready for David St John, as our very welcome Interim Chair, to take over - and it promptly shattered, sending little shards of glass all over my computer keyboard ...

 

balloons

Seventy five days.  That was one terrific acceptance speech.  But I kept thinking - didn't we all - whatever would the spirit of it all have been like if Biden hadn't stepped aside/been pushed aside/gone.  I suppose there would still have been 100,000 balloons, but not this excitement.  [Pause, while I use my credit card to give to her campaign, once again ...]

 

waiting for dinner

Harry's wasn't full tonight!  Waiting for dinner took, for once, just as long as the few minutes that it took for our friends to show up (we were early).  It fell into its traditional first night/last night role - not that it's invariably the first or the last stop, but it so often is.  And as ever, food and margaritas were excellent. Oh, and yes, we were back in time for Coach Walz!!

See you tomorrow, Los Angeles!

 

Abiquiu (and an owl)

This was our view this morning at the Abiquiu Inn - beautiful land.  And apricots hanging thickly on the trees;

as were some big homes inhabited by lots of wriggling fall webworms - moth caterpillars, and pests -

outside our room - which looks somewhat ramshackle here, but was very comfortable.

On the way back, we called in to the New Mexico Wildlife Center, just outside Espanola.  We've supported them for years - they do a terrific job rehabilitating injured wild animals and birds - and though in some ways it was melancholy to see the owls and raptors and a very, very large (and sleepy) bobcat, and an adorable silver fox not out in the wild, not one of them could survive there (unable to fly; too imprinted on humans, etc).  This is Corazon, a barn owl.

Oh, and by the way, the cats didn't seem to have missed us one little bit, which was slightly galling.  In other words, their feeders opened perfectly, and on time ...

 

our host at dinner

We're having a one-night pre-semester vacation ... the kitties have been left with not one but two automatic timed feeders ... so we don't imagine that they'll starve (even if we have a/c, and they don't).  Here we are at the Abiquiu Inn, in beautiful surroundiings, under the cottonwoods, and (speaking for myself) stuffed full of trout tacos ...

 

morning glories by moonlight

The time of day means, of course, that the flowers themselves aren't out ... nor, barely, are we, since it's been so hot, so we've slumped into two back to back Donald Sutherland tribute evenings - Don't Look Now last night (one of my favorite ever movies: Venice 51 years ago was, of course, very much the Venice I first went to ... 51 years ago, which made it poignant), and Klute, which I'd never seen before, tonight.  I always thought it was about gun fights and Mafia bosses, for some wrong reason.  A strange film - I'll have to think about that one.

 

ghostly morning glories

Projected onto the living room wall this morning - from across the terrace, and across the room - this morning's crop of (mostly) purple flowers.  It's like having one's very own camera obscura, only it's not upside down.

 

evening

It's been so hot today! - and even if we did manage, indeed, to go for a walk this morning, and then to the local farmers' market (honey! zucchini! eggs! and a chat with friends at the Voter Registration table), since the temperature is still over 80, we didn't do our customary post-dinner circuit, but went and sat in the back yard - to be rewarded both with a breeze, and with this sunset.

 

No! Just no!

I know this summer feels as though it's gone very fast, but this is ridiculous.  It is August 15th.  The semester hasn't started.  The schools here in NM have been back - what? Four days?  Party City, clearly, thinks it's the season for pumpkin cut-outs, even if it's 89 degrees outside.  Couldn't we look forward to celebrating ... Labor Day?

 

soaking and sunflowers

It's towards the end of the summer, and our customary ritual is to go and soak in a tub at 10,000 Waves, and then go and eat a lovely dinner in Izanami, their Japanese restaurant.  And to admire their wildflowers.

But ... although the soak, and the flowers, and indeed the food (that we received) were terrific, it was the worst service imaginable - inexplicably curt and grumpy. And believe me, we're a very charming and amenable couple to serve ... but a twenty minute wait before anyone came to take a drinks order was - long; then the food turned up before the sake and beer; then ... well, my main course never turned up.  We pointed this out, several times.  Eventually a waitperson told us the order-sheet in the kitchen said it had been delivered.  Manifestly it hadn't, or we'd have its remnants on the table.  Eventually our own waiter arrived (without the food), expressed no contrition, concern, or anything.  So I asked for the bill - which was put down in front of me without any grace - paid, and left (and yes, I did tip, but ...).  Not great, to have a special meal in a good restaurant, and to feel sulky all the way home.

 

an escapee

This Morning Glory clearly had no intention of doing what Morning Glories do, and climbing up a cane (or, after my horticultural intervention this morning, along a strand of green twine) - rather, it's curving along the terrace in a very elegant arabesque.

 

Gramsci at prayer

Surely he is praying that really, really, please, there might be some mice on the roof ... Unfortunately, if there are, they must have chewed through the a/c cables once again ... because it went off again this afternoon (in the middle of grad student Zoom calls).  Or else (which is even more likely) nothing was properly mended last week, and it all shorted again.  This is getting wearisome.

Grammy, anyway, found it all too much.

 

postcard writing

At a postcard writing event this afternoon, chez our Democratic precinct captains - a very good turnout (mostly, that is, from the precinct itself, but a stray handful from Glorieta).  We were getting cards ready to send - in October! - to the uncommitted, the unsure, the registered-but-not-necessarily-given-to-actually-turning-out-to-vote.  My bunch were to Black voters in Maricopa County in Arizona, telling them that Our Rights Are On the Ballot on November 5th.  We can't tell them who to vote for, of course - but I think the message is clear enough... An afternoon well spent (and that's not even counting eating the peach cake made with peaches from the Colorado Peach Guy).

 

big sunflowers

People were coming away from the farmers' market today with armfuls of huge sunflowers - I'm sure that I would have done, too, if it weren't that I know from experience that they often don't last at all ... Believe it or not, this was the first trip to the FM in town this summer - we got here so late, and then my dental woes have made eating anything that wasn't absurdly soft or pureed - well, not so much a challenge, as impossible.   But I'm moving slowly forwards - and the bags of produce that we carried back don't look too chewy or crunchy, at all ...

 

morning glory, stormy day

Posing bravely against the storm ... although in fact the storm turned up later in the day, and came from the other direction.  I know, by now, that I must seem obsessed by the morning glories, and maybe I am - but they make me - day after day - very cheerful.  And that seems very much in the spirit of the Harris/Walz campaign.  I can't quite get my head around its use of the word "joy" - a sentiment of which I wholeheartedly approve, of course - but linguistically ... well, my mother was called Joy, a name which she loathed (probably realizing that, despite her many virtues, it wasn't one that suited her core spirit).  So every time I hear it invoked by H and W, I do a kind of double take, all the while cheering them - and their cheerfulness - on.

 

Mountains, Moorlands, and Moth

Hard at work, today ... There is, indeed, continuity in my work obsessions.  My last full book chapter is on Moorlands and peat bogs - on Millais and Moran, among others - but truly, this is involves going back to environmental interests that are so long-standing that my copy of W. H. Pearsall's Mountains and Moorlands, in Fontana's "New Naturalist" series, cost 12s 6d.  That's pre-decimal ... I wonder where my school project on Tregaron Bog, in Cardiganshire, has got to?  Moth, as you can tell, is unimpressed.

 

unapologetically, morning glories, again

Compared with when we arrived here, which must have been - what? - just under three weeks ago - the morning glories are now becoming a veritable bower.  Alas, the emails about the new semester are thickening my inbox dreadfully.  What do you mean, I need a new Tappable university ID card, in order to access whatever new campus security loops they've put in place?  Why do I think the student-moving-in period, and the very start of the semester, are going to be chaos? Why can't I just sit in that rocking chair?

 

our well camouflaged neighbor (and other wildlife commentary)

OK - he or she is a little over-pixelated, because we weren't as close as this suggests, and in any case I was snatching the shot.  And this is why we have indoor kitties (despite Gramsci's occasional attempts at demolishing the screens).  He or she seems young, fit, and not overtly bothered by us ...

The rest of the day has been spent (a) celebrating Tim Walz [a cat man!  And dog man, and piglet man, and in all other conceivable ways clearly a West Coast Radical Liberal in mid-western wolf's (or coyote's) clothing.  Not.]. and (b) welcoming the A/C engineer, yet again - who has two of the units working (again) and has found that the wires of the third keep shorting (scary) because they've been chewed through by mice.  I guess we'll be up on the roof leaving bars of Irish Spring soap everywhere.  Why can't the neighborhood bobcats spend a night or two up there, snacking?

 

monsoon clouds

Or: the beauty of everyday clouds - everyday, at least, at this time of the year, when one's looking at them and hoping for monsoon moisture.  These - or their relatives - released about ten minutes worth of rain on us - not enough, but it cooled things down, mercifully (the engineers should come back tomorrow to look at our broken-again a/c).  In the meantime, I swear I have become addicted to coconut water.

 

our one solo hollyhock

One handsome volunteer hollyhock.  Our only one, this year.  What you can't really see is that it's only about a foot tall, which isn't exactly par for the course, when it comes to hollyhocks ... but we're very happy to see her, all the same.

 

unfurling

It's getting to that point in the year when every morning brings an enthusiastic new flowering of morning glories, which are shooting their way up canes (memo to self - buy more canes ... and some garden twine to string between them).  Despite their late start, and despite the heat, they're doing well ...

 

evening light

A bit of a reprise of the other evening, I know, but the alliums (allia??) are all coming spectacularly into flower, and this was a bit of sunset that didn't get swallowed up by clouds, so there you are.  Mouth - not aching so much, but still in somewhat painful territory - not least because I keep biting my tongue.  Polenta, today, was my friend.  But I could go for walks!  Went to the farmers' market! (more sunflowers).  And could, more or less, work ...

 

how I felt today

Very much like Gramsci, indeed - I just wanted to curl up and put my paws and tail over my head.  I trust I'll feel better tomorrow - at the moment all I can hear are the antibiotics and painkillers rattling around inside me.

In related dental news, last night I dreamed that I had a back molar that Banksy had painted with a yellow and black mural, and that people were trying to get into my mouth and steal it.