a fierce hunter

OK - let's be honest.  He's practicing.  But practice is important.  And this morning he tracked down, and captured, the string on one of my hats.

 

froggy

 

Froggy.  On my way home today, looking roughly how I felt.  I don't think I ever imagined that I'd be working in an environment where we sat around in a department meeting sharing knowledge about resources to share with our students should they, or someone they know, suddenly find themselves in danger of having their visa status revoked, or being arrested, or ... 

Iris at night

One of those shockingly busy days when I didn't stop ... lunch was a handful or so of sesame sticks while I finished a power point for the 2 p.m. class, and when emails came in faster than I could answer them.  But I did go and sit in the little patch of graveled garden outside my study window after dinner: a warm night, at last, so this wasn't masochistic, and all the irises are blooming; and I've always fancied it as a quiet spot for sitting - in this case, on a boulder (artfully positioned there by our landscaper - I'd never previously thought of it as a stone seat, but it functions perfectly as one).  That last a few minutes, anyway ... now for the graduate summer grant applications ...

 

chromatic

This is quite some bicycle get-up!  It seems appropriate to mention that at long last, I received approval to teach a GESM - a General Education Seminar - called "On Color."  I've been wanting to do this for an age, but only did the final persnicketty corrections to my mock syllabus over Spring Break.  I'm not sure when I'll do this, but it's on the books, and moves between scientific color theory and Derek Jarman, with a whole lot of pigment grinding and sourcing in the middle.  Oh, and we'll make a playlist for Spotify, starting, I suppose, with Donovan's "Colours," though that may get them pedaling off on their bicycles quicker than they can say "unenroll" ...

 

redbud leaves

A decidedly quieter post than yesterday: no muskrats involved, although it was a lively late afternoon for coyote squeals, and there's currently much Great Horned Owl hooting going on right outside.  I was sitting outside reading graduate work this afternoon, but kept getting distracted by the sheer beauty of the translucent - more translucent than they look here - young redbud leaves.

 

whose streets? Our streets!

I so enjoyed painting these signs!!  Admittedly, the lettering on the Delete key is a bit iffy, but the muskrat is delectable.  Perhaps not entirely anatomically correct - few muskrats have teeth quite as sharp and white as this - but he looked better with them (and with blood dripping from his claws).  

And off we went to the local demo in Los Feliz, which sprawled around one complex intersection and over another - there may have been five hundred people in all.  Here's Alice with her sign ...

- and not only was it heartening to have so many cheerful (if basically angry) people out on the streets, of all ages, but wonderful support from cars and trucks honking as they went past, and a USPS driver, and an ambulance driver.  There's so little one can do by way of fully active opposition, seemingly, so much of the time, that at least participating in solidarity gives one a forward propelling sense of strength in numbers.

 

conference vegetables

There was time, at today's lunchtime conference break, to go and see how spring is coming along in the Huntington's gardens - unsurprisingly beautiful, especially some beds of very pale yellow poppies.  A colleague and I went and crushed leaves of sage and thyme and geraniums in the herb garden and pretended for five minutes that all was well with the world, which it so very clearly isn't.  I so love how the Huntington appreciates the beauty of what one might conventionally think of as vegetables: the yellow and reddish stalks of the chard, and the very fat globes of artichokes.

 

a wedding bouquet

At the time of the fires, in January, I moved a lot of things - like paintings - into my office at USC, and now I'm slowly moving most of them back.  But some objects - like old photographs, and old family memorabilia, seem safer there, or at least less combustible.  On the other hand, since Taper Hall can have dicey water pipes ... I've been moving them into my deepest filing cabinet.  Today, I unearthed my paternal grandmother's wedding bouquet ... or at least a fragment of it: the actual bouquet (some wedding photos emerged a few minutes later) was a magnificent creation.

The wedding was on May 24th 1920: Gran would have been just 21, and Joe, my father's father, 29.  He'd been back from the First World War for a year and a half.  They were married in the Primitive Methodist Church in Hunslet, Leeds (my grandmother's family were Methodist; his C of E), and then, by the look of it, returned to her family home at 22 Cranbrook Avenue, Beeston - also in Leeds - which is where they then lived.  My uncle Don was born just over a year later; my father in 1923.  It's unbearable to think that by the end of 1928, their father was dead - he looks so happy and full of life, here.  But he caught pneumonia in a flu epidemic, and his lungs had been damaged by gas in WW1 (so the family story that was passed on to me by my mother went - but she was an unreliable narrator) - but whatever, that was it - leaving Gran with two very small boys.

They look rather solemn here - but I cheered them up a little with Photoshop's colorizing smart filter ...

 

obscurity and obliteration

The demise of Wood pizza restaurant - seemingly an economic casualty, like so much - has left a torn postered, graffiti scarred, dead tree environment, which seems like a visual metaphor for so much about the country.  And there am I, trying to talk about the Ruskin-Whistler trial, aestheticism, and Pater's aesthetic beliefs all in one 100-minute segment (with class discussion in groups, in which they all battled with different segments of Whistler's Ten O'Clock lecture, quite successfully), and wondering quite how to make it speak to the state of things today, beyond dropping in some asides about being able to visit The Peacock Room, say, in the Smithsonian's Freer/National Museum of Asian Art, assuming the Smithsonian is still opening by the time they get there ... On the other hand, a class period talking about Victorian art is, at the very minimum, a little spell when I, at least, am not glued glumly to the news cycle (and yes, that case of tariff-beating French/Italian/Spanish wine arrives tomorrow from wine.com ...)

 

next door ... coming soon!

The vans full of Staging Furniture were there bright and early this morning, and apparently were there all day ... any moment now, we will be officially looking for new neighbors.  The screen writer next door realised that much though she loved the house, it somehow wasn't suitable for two very tiny children (given that it's on a steep hill, and is all stairs, inside and out, with no flat outside play space whatsoever, you'd have thought that she might have considered that before buying it in the first place, but people are ... well, let's just say that she must have fallen in love with the view).

 

not the real thing, BUT ...

Two nights ago, I was down in my study, working ... and Gramsci was convinced there was a mouse sharing our space.  He was fixated on the area under my mother's old desk, behind the books, behind more books... Admittedly, sometimes I thought I heard a very slight rustling - but it could have been a large moth (or, worse, still, a cockroach), but on balance, I thought it best (or cowardly) ignored.  

No sounds yesterday, although Gramsci was strangely fixated when we went to bed.  Usually he climbs onto my chest, into my arms, purrs.  Last night ... he fetched the red mouse (seen above), shook it, chased it on and off the bed, and eventually fetched another (yellow) mouse from a different part of the room, and repeated the performance.

Was he trying to tell me something?  Surely.  This morning, he disappeared down to my study, pre-breakfast.  I was trying to leave by 6.30, a long and painful dental appointment awaiting me on the other side of town.  Then at 6.29, I found him in the dining room, guarding the sweetest and unharmed (physically, that is - who knows about psychological scars?) little field mouse hiding behind the door.  She was captured under a plastic bowl, and escorted to a safe space down the garden.

Grammy is very pleased with himself.  Myself, I'm blown away by what he was telling me through that role play with the toy mice.

 

sniffing spring

In truth, it was a grey, gloomy, and very chilly day, which began with some light rain.  All the same, the wisteria is out down the street, and so is the - is it a gardenia?  Alice is sniffing it, hoping to find out.  

 

abandoned?

Or, more likely, dropped, and rescued, and left for her ... does one say "owner," for a doll as self-possessed as this one?  "Person"?  ... to come and find her again.  By Silver Lake reservoir, which seems to be a positive mecca for lost toys, but this one is lifelike enough to make one hunt for some kind of narrative, some kind of metaphor, here.

 

The Poet's Wife

She's out right on time: all that rain a few weeks ago encouraged her.  I still don't know which poet - the David Austin website doesn't explain, although it does inform one that she has 77 petals, which seems rather special.  

 

wooing potential graduate students

Two busy days of hoping that we can persuade the graduate students to whom we've made offers to come ... and today was a morning - and lunch - at the Huntington: some paintings; a library visit - both of those with a colleague - and a walk round the desert garden (and past the poppies - why are they so much more advanced than ours? I guess they get more sun ...) - and lunch, before back to another class visit, and dinner (before they all headed off to a bar)  It's always strange at this stage: they seem always like our new class, and they seem like a bonded flock - and then there are always some that one never sees again - or next sees at CAA, or when they apply for a job in the department some seven years later, or or or ...  

 

balloons

I don't know.  Only they emphatically are not cardinal and gold, and therefore fairly inexplicable.  They are very variegated in their blueness - I'd say: are they for the Dodgers home opener tomorrow, but really none of them are a true Dodgers blue.  Maybe they're to welcome our Graduate Prospective to campus?  It was such a gloomy day, in terms of the weather (and in terms of university and national politics, for that matter) that anything cheering was welcome.

 

first poppies

The very first Californian poppies are blooming in the back yard!  I strewed handfuls and handfuls of them, and I'm hoping that these will be the first of many.

This was a cheerful sight to start a day that then rapidly went downhill when the University told us that our senior search has been halted - when we had already started bringing candidates to campus - for when they said that cuts and budget restrictions would start immediately, they meant it.  We feel particularly angry about this, because we were all ready to roll with this search in January - and then the fires happened, and half of our committee was houseless, and all of us were rattled, distracted, distressed - and it would have been unrealistic to bring senior candidates to campus at that moment.  So we ran our junior search, regrouped, had one senior candidate visit - and now, bam.  Nada.  

 

Gramsci contemplates

... the distance between Winslow and Los Angeles from the top of an armoire at La Posada, and thinks that it could be a long time before he gets his dinner.

Little did her know that he's have to listen - via Zoom - to a Faculty interview session with someone on the short list for our next Dean; a History department meeting; and the reading aloud of a Dear Colleagues, or Dear Trojan Family, or whatever-it-was email, about Frozen Faculty and Staff hiring; no salary increases this year; a chunk of staff winter break being taken away from them (what good will that do?); no "unnecessary" conference travel (which would be what, exactly??) - and so on.  Gloom ahead.  But Grams (and Moth) got their dinner on time - we were home by 5 p.m.

 

both ends of the day

First thing this morning - the strangest of double chem trails, like a shadow piercing the clouds.  But then a very beige - and very truck-heavy - drive to Winslow (no snow, though - more like a heat wave, this time ...) - to find that our favorite (and the cats' favorite) room at La Posada has been refurbished, and the mirror repositioned, and well ... the cats did not know what to make of that!

 

Mike Messner's book party

We were so happy that our old friend and colleague's Mike Messner's book party happened while we could still - just! - be here for Spring Break!  To say that it's a book about his old High School's yearbook makes it sound parochial - and it's anything but, even if the one hundred and twenty years of Salinas High School's publication offer the basis for a wide-reaching discussion of student life: sports and academics; gender and racial demographics, and plenty of surprises (finding that at one time the cheerleaders were all boys certainly puts a different spin on stereotypes).  Of course, in England we never had yearbooks, as such - rather, it was - and is - the School Magazine - and an analogous study might be somewhat different.  But this is a tour de force - micro into macro history - and stunningly produced by Rutgers University Press - it's a really beautiful volume.

Mike above, and Pierrette below, and in the mirror Doe Mayer - another former USC colleague, now a Santa Fe-an, too.

and, for complete irrelevance, a bluebird in Eldorado, except that it was so beautiful I had to share it.

 

out to dinner

We managed to leave our desks this evening (spring break, so-called, has neither been long enough nor by any stretch of the imagination a real break) to have dinner at Escondido, a newish Mexican restaurant on the east side of town, in a curiously futuristic tiny new development: it has (as we discovered when we were last here) amazing margaritas and real Mexican (as opposed to New Mexican) food - the Chile en Nogada mightn't be quite as good as the dish I had once in Mexico City (in a tiny restaurant weirdly positioned at the end of a street where the shops apparently sold nothing but wedding dresses), but it came close.

 

jar of utensils

I'll take moments of beauty during the day when I can get them, thank you.  This greeted me while I was making coffee this morning (don't worry - the cats were fed first) - and somehow it just summed up why I find being here in NM so relaxing... not that the rest of the day was that way: much admin, interspersed only by a trip to Fable - which is slowly taking over the space where Arable, of blessed memory, used to be in the Agora (our local set of shops), and promises very well indeed: lunch was chicken mole empañadas.  Only take out, and a tiny menu at present - I can't wait for it to be up and running for dinner.  The cooking utensils will be resting in their jar, some nights, I'm sure.

 

watching Rachel Maddow

Gramsci has watched a lot of news in his nearly four years on this earth (can that be? he's still ridiculous), and become nightly more horrified, as do we.  So watching Rachel is interspersed with more doom-scrolling ('did you see that?') and googling properties for sale in Brighton, or wherever.  I have no real immediate wish to move to Brighton ... but of course what we're witnessing is unprecedented, and awful.  First, however, resisting and fighting back, somehow.  Grammy would agree.  And I don't know what we're going to do when Rachel stops being on - with her guests - every night: 100 days post-Trump has been a treat.

 

dust in the air

... and this is by far the clearest that it's been all day.  Mostly it's been thick adobe brown obscurity. We had 40 mph winds, gusting up to 60 or so, and around 2.30 this afternoon our phones screeched with an Emergency Warning telling us of dust storms with zero visibility, and so on.  I-40 was closed, with crashes on La Bajada.  It's a good job that Alice flew in yesterday, not today.  It took a while rescuing the big recycling bin from the ditch, and then its lid kept flying open and whopping me over the head as I dragged it back up the driveway.  New Mexico can be like this in March, I know - it is without argument my least favorite month here - but it's when Spring Break happens, so that is that ...

 

spring break may really be here!

Yes - it could, indeed, be Spring Break!  Even if much of my day was consumed by admin issues, I then went down to Albuquerque to pick Alice up, and then straight (if 70 miles is "straight") to Harry's for margaritas and - well, as ever, I had Tinga de Pollo tacos, but, it being St Patrick's Day, Alice had the Guinness Lamb Stew.  She's not (despite her heritage) wearing green, but I dug out the greenest top in my closet, even if it's more Brat Summer than shamrock.  There were a lot of people wearing green check hats with lights (I just checked on line - they had to come from somewhere - Walmart, $5.97).  But seeing the other offerings ... I'm thinking I might invest in a glowing, blinking fedora for next year, and still have change from $10.  

 

an enigmatic flamingo

This is beautifully inexplicable, especially on the back wall of Santa Fe's Whole Foods.  At least, at a time of year when I find it hard not to keep checking in on live bird cams (Jackie and Shadow, the bald eagles at Big Bear; the barred owls in Indiana; the Great Horned Owl at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas - I particularly like Athena: she looks like a brooding cat), I don't have to worry about this one.

 

snowing?

Gramsci was totally horrified at the white stuff falling from the sky (some of it snow, some of it sleet, some of it little round hail pellets).  Mind you, it had been an unsettling morning.  I was grinding coffee beans and was totally disconcerted by a vibrating, drilling noise outside – like a thick spring reverberating in the wind, only there wasn't that kind of wind, today.  So I bundled into a jacket and hat and went to investigate.  There was a very large (and cross) Flicker, who was presumably excavating insects from the canales, or any other bit of wood he could find on the roof.  Such is semi-rural life.  Much of the day was spent inside, understandably, catching up with such exciting tasks as my USC Information Security Training (I hr 15 minutes of learning not to click on suspicious links in one's email).

 

a long day on the road ...

We - that's the cats and I - made it!  It was a long drive from Tucson, with wind and occasional dust storms, but nothing as apocalyptic as yesterday's rain.  Arrived as the sun was going down ...

... at the other end, the cats were the star of the day at check out.  Miaow, miaow, miaow they went, as I pushed the trolley into the front hall at Tucson's Graduate Hotel (much recommended).  Oh My God, said the young guy behind the desk - Are They Cats?  I love Cats!  I can't charge for cats!  (and he didn't: their cuteness saved me $75).  And then a group of women on some kind of leadership tour - couldn't quite make out what - but sustainability, borderlands, etc -crowded round: oh, aren't they sweet!!  And then the woman who'd served me in the coffee shop - "aaaaaah.... can I take their pictures for the coffee shop?  Gramsci!  Is he - he looks like - a Bengal?"  [he loved that].  It was hard dragging them away from their adoring fans.

 

LA to Tucson

It was a very, very wet drive from Los Angeles to ... Tucson.  I had to take the southern route - via the 10 - which is much longer than the 40 - because it was dumping snow on Flagstaff, and that quickly gets impassable.  But the rain, the rain ... whole sections of the 210, and then, especially, once I was back on the 10 after a Phoenix-avoiding loop to Gila Bend and heading towards Tucson, were like driving through the worse monsoon rains - cars aquaplaning, semis jackknifing into boggy central reservations, and so on.  But I just kept on keeping on - what else could I have done?  The clouds were dramatic - I wish I could have pulled over near Gila Bend to take more pictures, and at one point there was a rainbow - but not much that one can do when one's just determined to arrive safely.

The most chilling site was near Blythe.  Here there was a big traffic tailback because of road works, and La Migra clearly had decided to take advantage of very slow moving cars, and had pulled this one over, and were clearly interrogating whoever (I couldn't see) was in the passenger seat. But I'll never - and I hope I never - be able to forget the sight of the face of the woman who had been driving: one of fear, and horror, and desperation.  What can one do?  Half a mile down the road, I was thinking - should I have asked ¿Hay alguien a quien pueda llamar por ti? but even if so - and if I hadn't been arrested myself - to say what?  Or is there an ICE/BP hotline to give a tip off so that help can be offered by them?  Or or or?  I kept wondering (it was about 2 p.m.) if she had kids to pick up from school, and if she'd ever get there. 

And in any case, I had passengers.