not the most picturesque of views

... but for the bevy of stucco-menders and layers; the carpenter; the painters; the handymen who have been passing through this place and who will continue to do so for the next few weeks, one imagines that it's a very welcome sight.

The people who may be less happy, however - or the person - would be the realtor selling the house on the left - now 52 days on the market, and its owners long ago having departed for Brooklyn.  Somehow the deliverers of this useful tiny edifice have deposited it in the sightline of just about the one window that doesn't look out into an overgrown tree ...

 

more rearrangement ...

The stuccoing, the mending, and the rest of it continues ... We've had to pull all the plant pots away from the house and the walls and into the middle of the yard - where they look quite good massed together, especially with the solar powered lights stuck in them (relocated from the edge of the terrace, so workers don't trample on them) ...

 

Zozobra week!

 

It's Zozobra week!  Old Man Gloom will go up in flames on Friday night in Fort Marcy Park (luckily a bear has descended from a tree there and ambled off), full of things that people want to get rid of written on little pieces of paper - bad things that they've said or done or thought (a bit like a confessional), or, let's say, the name of the president.  We won't, I think, be there (although I've always rather wanted to go) - but I'm happy to celebrate him in virtual form, here in a mural on the back of a closed dry cleaners on Cerrillos.  

September sky

Hard to believe that we've arrived at September, but when I went for a (literally) fast walk this evening, I could more or less tell myself that there was a faint sense of fall in the air.  Another way of putting it: it's time the Dodgers got their act together ...

 

rearrangement

The stucco work on the house began today - and the team managed to accomplish a good deal before a big storm struck.  We had to move plant pots, and furniture, and - well, everything, away from the house, which means we have this fetching little arrangement of chairs and table sitting as if we are about to take tea, or a margarita, overlooking the road, with a hint of sunset in the background.  The cats did not care for the power washing (nor did we).  And as a result of the storminess, we were without internet for about six hours, which was very far from a blessing when faced with various end-of-month deadlines: there's a limit to what one can do by way of tethering one's computer to the one-to-two fluctuating bars of reception that one gets on the sort-of grid out here.

 

Geometry of dining

To dinner with friends at La Paloma - an excellent Mexican (as opposed to New Mexican) restaurant in town - with a view from our table through to a private room/courtyard - everything looking poised for an evening ... though no one else ever arrived there.

 

Coopy

Our magnificent Coopers Hawk is back - looking for ... rabbits? 

We went to see Eliza Gilkyson (plus Ray Wylie Hubbard and Jimmie Dale Gilmore) at the Lensic tonight, and it struck me how, when I first heard and fell for Gilkyson's music which must have been ... maybe in 2000, maybe a little earlier ... the line in "The Beauty Way" that goes "Red hawk diving for a rat on Sunset" meant absolutely, absolutely nothing to me.

 

leaf

I haven't anything in particular to say about this young Morning Glory leaf - it's just a particularly nice leaf.

One of the regular exercises (or so it felt like) at my junior school - when I was eight or nine -was to find words to substitute for those bland, lazy four letters: "nice."  Ummmm - luminous? fresh? spiny and corrugated? cheerful?

 

choices

... and here are three of the four painted bits of board, which we are moving around into shadow, into shade, into sun, in order to see what looks best when it comes to wood trim (the re-stuccoed walls will remain more or less the same reddish brown, most likely).  I think it's fair to say that they don't show very accurately in a photograph - or rather, perhaps, the photographs indicate quite how changeable the colors are in different lights.  This afternoon we had a phone call from the stucco company saying they'd had a cancelation, and could they start work on Monday ... please keep your fingers crossed that they are not power-washing the walls during any important Zoom meetings, or, for that matter, when I'm trying to Think.

 

local lichen

It's been a while since I've celebrated lichen here ... I was sitting outside on a rock this afternoon, painting some boards in a range of sample colors: one of them will end up being the new paint for the trim on our house here when we get it re-stuccoed very soon (what color do I want? "lichen" is the best description I can find, though "winter chamisa" may run it close: I think it'll likely end up being something called "misted green."  Anyway - what color is lichen?  None of these is quite what I meant ...).

 

sleeping animals

One of these animals is not like the others ... we went to Petsmart this morning to buy some cat litter, and they had some truly adorable ferrets.  I swear my mother kept ferrets when she was a little girl, but it might have been Auntie Marjorie across the road (though I think she had rabbits, and the two aren't exactly compatible).  But I doubt I have a note of this anywhere, and so can probably never verify it ...

And that, I thought, was it for sleeping animals of note for today.  But after lunch, I didn't sit in my desk chair since Moth was in it, and was reading peacefully in my armchair - then looked round, and thought - no, surely Moth doesn't have that many paws?  In five years, I have never, ever seen them curled up asleep together.  They can hardly have been doing it to keep warm (although admittedly, the a/c was on).  This went on for a while, and was the sweetest thing.  Maybe a corner has been turned?

And Gramsci is even more adorable than a white ferret.

 

marigolds

Clearly, I've not changed my camera lens, and am still experimenting with semi close-up focusing ... all the while assessing which plants I'll uproot from their pots and transplant, in a couple of weeks, from dry New Mexico to scorching Los Angeles.  The car journey is always an adventure, because of going through the agricultural checkpoint: although it's legal to transport horticulture from Santa Fe county to California, one can sound like a very pesky know-it-all if one gets stopped and tries to explain.  In any case, the herbs will all come, and the geraniums, and after that ...?  Not that the photogenic quality of one plant over another is a determining factor ...

 

a flower gets its close-up

I've been cleaning the closet in my study today - a very long overdue job, despite various surface attempts that have been made over the last decade or so.  You never know what you will find - but I was delighted to uncover my camera's Micro lens (yes, I know that, in turn, that's an odd thing to.misplace entirely, but I never managed to work it properly, so it was languishing).  Today I, er, read the manual responsibly ....

My study closet had corners that were like a creative graveyard.  I'm less talking about dead felt tip pens than old software: remember when one had to insert a CD in order to install various early forms of Photoshop; for things like free photo borders that came with magazines that probably no longer exist in hard copy; for installing printers, and stuff for one's iPod (remember iPods?); and to run Tom Tom - that early form of GPS that didn't work very well at all, and inevitably ran out of usefulness when cell phone coverage, or its equivalent, lapsed.  The recent past sometimes seems a long time ago ...

 

curdled sky

A modest view of the great outdoors from - more or less - outside our fron door this morning, before I descended into a day from which I emerged with a promotion letter for someone at another institution written and polished.  These things take so long!  It's satisfactory when they're completed, sure - and one agrees to write them because - well, that's the way the system works.  But it's one of the profession's stranger genres.

 

cat in a tree trunk

Someone has a brand new crinkle tunnel, with a couple of side branches.  Its purchase was inspired, of course, by my chapter on Bark.  It lacks lichen, but it does have a few green leaves flapping off it, and, quite wonderfully, there are some really kitsch squirrels photo-superimposed on it.  Grammy has never seen a tunnel, or box (or bath) that he didn't want to inhabit, but I'm pleased to report that Moth did her own inspection and temporary occupation.

 

alliums

they are out! - in our front yard.  I always marvel at how one day they look like bulging chive stems, and the next they're a flurry of stalks and flowers and black seeds.  And when the storm burst this afternoon, I realised that one reason why they do so well in that precise spot is that water pours from the roof down one of the canales onto the, - even though we've been in such a drought, clearly enough moisture has been deposited on them, one way or another, for them to flourish once again.

 

morning light

shining through the kitchen window, blocked by the tin horse, and reaching the fireplace: a thin morning sun coming through thin cloud, or haze - I don't think smoke, because it was blowing east, not south, today.

 

the bathtub

It may be that Gramsci is in hunting mode - one might, indeed, find a spider in the bathtub, and if one's exceptionally lucky, a centipede, or a Jerusalem bug.  But actually, between the outer curtain, and the inner curtain, and the bath mat - so many possibilities for hide and seek.  He's been in a boisterous mood today, for all that he looks like a bathtub philosopher (that would be Diogenes of Sinope, I think, although in the Gérôme painting of this ancient cynic in his tub, he's surrounded by a lot of rather wolf-like, unfriendly dogs).

 

stripey morning glory

My morning glories here self-seed, year after year, and natural selection seems to have ensured that by now they are mostly Grandpa Ott, with a smaller number of deep pink ones.  But this morning ... a solitary pale blue and purple Harlequin made its appearance above the petunias, and very lovely it was, too.

 

wildlife

A couple of days ago, I threw out an orange that had gone bad - threw it at a distance, as if it were a baseball - to see whether something would eat it.  Obviously a bird or a critter has opened it up, and it's now been occupied by huge black ants.  Which would be fascinating in its own right - but was upstaged, half an hour later, by our going for an early morning walk and encountering ... a bear!  A brown, furry, positively cuddly bear (they have been coming down from the mountains because it's so dry and parched this summer), which ambled across the road and then, realizing we were looking in its direction, lolloped off down the green belt and towards the railroad tracks.  

This is the first bear I've seen in Eldorado in 23 years.  A few years back, someone posted to Nextdoor in rather disgruntled fashion that they'd moved here because they'd become fed up with bears in California, and they'd looked out of their window that morning and seen one in a tree.  But this is not ... usual.

 

pickled tomatoes

Last week, I pickled a whole lot of cherry tomatoes that looked like they weren't going to make it for very many more days; tonight I opened them up (perfect with salmon), and they were completely delicious.  I should credit one of my colleagues, Corrine Collins, with the inspiration, since she posted to Instagram a picture of some focaccia that she'd made with pickled tomatoes: I doubt that I'll take this jar to such culinary heights, but I'm super-pleased that I made these, and it won't be the last batch.

 

inspecting a table

Today, our now-departed-for-Brooklyn neighbors held an Estate Sale (a term I thought for a long while only applied to the dispersal of items belonging to deceased people, but apparently not - at least, not in this form, run by a professional firm who do all the sorting and labeling and arranging).  How could we resist?  I mean, there was a lot we could resist, like the unfathomable number of plastic spatulas (spatulae?), and so on, but we came away with a few trophies - a flower jug, a Mexican metal waste bin, a garden pot, and this small blue outside table, which now I've hosed it down is outside the front door.  But while it was drying, it was visited by a Towhee, which perched, and then flew off ...

 

posing

It's only mid-August, but these two seem to have decided that today was the day in which they'd model for their Christmas card portrait (to be found, as always, on the front verso).  Of course, it's really a concerted presence just before their teatime, in case somehow or the other we forget to feed them, and they starve.

 

morning (glory), evening

A strangely illuminated morning glory this morning (when I was fiddling around with the camera); and then a glorious storm sky this evening - a very small storm, all things considered, but at the moment we, and everyone in these parts, will take all the rain we can get, as the Frijoles fire churns on, and on, and we read briefings and maps, and hope that firefighters continue all of their wonderful work to bulldoze lines between it and homes ... (it's about sixteen miles away from us, as the crow - and indeed the smoke - flies - so I'd hate anyone reading this to think that we're in any immediate danger.  But some properties and little villages, let alone lots of animals, are ...)

 

dinner decor

The decor for dinner this evening was almost as good as the food itself: Alkemē, in Santa Fe, bills itself as Vietnamese Heritage Cuisine Reimagined, and was ... wonderful.  I wish we had the stomach capacity to manage the tasting menus, but as it was, I had an extraordinary soup of shrimp and Mapo-style (call it Sichuan, more or less) sauce and dashi custard; followed by a most complex mushroom and tofu filled cabbage roll or 4 in another equally complex sauce, and with some woven rice noodles, lots of pickles, and so on.  We will be back (if we can ever get a table, again - it's not exactly a walk-in spot) ...

 

today's burrito

I assume that Gramsci is entirely unconscious of how ridiculous he looks.  It's a good job that I didn't particularly want to sit in my favorite chair, this morning ...

 

camouflage

... from my study window: this is, I believe, a female Western Tanager.  There's been a male WT flying around the last few days: one can hardly miss him, since much of his body is bright yellow, with a reddish-orange head.  Very striking.  But she blends in, very carefully and cleverly.

 

farmers market - changing seasons

It may still be 90 degrees outside, and the air is full of smoke from the expanding Frijoles fire to the north of us, and everything is still bone dry - but in the Farmers Market, the changing seasons are making themselves visible: gladioli alongside the marigolds; extremely tasty tomatoes;

new season's garlic appearing in strings;

and chile, chile, chile.

 

and tonight

... and tonight: a sky straight out of the excesses of Romantic art, or the apocalypse.  Let's hope not the latter.  

 

back!

Back, to a very fiery sun this evening.  No actual fire here, but plenty of smoke particles thickening the air, so a sunset that, in the spirit of Krakatoa, is both vibrantly beautiful and not a good thing.

 

random variegated patterns

That was a long day!  England from above - you can see how dry it is - and the room carpet in the Albuquerque Airport Sheraton.  Delighted though I am to see a bed, this is possibly the nastiest hotel carpet in existence...

 

(and that's a wrap)

This is very often my last-night in England view: St Pancras, from the Standard hotel, which is remarkably well positioned for making an exit the next morning. It looks remarkably like the Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes in Buenos Aires ...

It was a real treat to go round the amazing Whistler exhibition with Carol Jacobi, its curator - as she reminded me, it's 28 years since I examined her PhD ... so good, always, to hear what principles went into the show's making; what had been cleaned especially for it and what the x-rays showed, and so on.  And then we talked for an age, and I only had time to go back to it fairly briefly (but I'll see it again, I hope, when it comes to DC).  There was a lot that was new to me, especially the very early works - I especially liked Chelsea in Ice (1864).  Given how hot this trip has been (a record dry July), this is truly a record of another era.

 

a visit to the Ancestral, and other bits of north Norfolk

 

First, exploration of Kings Lynn - the old parts are truly beautiful: the Guild Hall; an old market place with some very wonky houses;

and a lovely Minster.

Then a bus to East Rudham.  East Rudham is such a small, and largely unspoilt village that one can easily imagine what it was like in the 1860s and 70s.  My great-grandmother - my father's grandmother, who was very involved in bringing up him and his brother Don, was born there in 1865.  She and her siblings were certainly still there at the time of the 1871 census: family lore (or my grandmother's wobbly memory) recounts that my great great grandfather was given a ride to the elections (in Fakenham, 5 miles away?) by the landowner for whom he worked, and he was overheard saying that he wouldn't vote for any Tory - and by the time they returned, his sentiments had been reported; and the family were no longer allowed to graze their donkey on the village green (below), and they were turned out of their tied cottage, and went to work in the mills in Sheffield.  But ... even after the 1884 Reform Act, my ggg still, as an agricultural laborer, wouldn't have been able to vote, and in any case, by 1881 they were all up north.  I think they must have been given the day off for the 1874 election, because I do have a sense that my gg was about 9 or ten when they moved.  But I also think that the agricultural depression was just starting to bite then, too.

In any case, the shock of living on this street must have been enormous, after bucolic Norfolk.

Even the old looking village church might have looked weird when they were leaving, since the medieval tower collapsed into the nave in 1873, and was rebuilt ...

Were they around when this, and some other medieval alabaster fragments, were found in the collapse?

And where did they live?  "Lower Anchorage," says the 1871 census.  But is this Lower Anchorage?  Yes, according to some accounts.  But it's also known as Anchorage Cottage, and Anchorage House - I can't find a separate "Lower Anchorage" on C19th (or more recent) maps, and it's been very refurbished.  (Nothing to do with mooring a boat: there was a medieval anchoress who lived there, or in an earlier structure).

I hope I can be more confident that the relative who was a blacksmith lived in Forge Cottage.

After that, another bus back to Kings Lynn, and a bas to Hunstanton - archetypal English resort if you walk in one direction;

muddy beach in another (why a pink Messi #10 short??);

rock pools looking like a nineteenth-century painting from my book;

extraordinary cliffs;

more seaweed:

a cute lighthouse;

and back for dinner at my hotel, overlooking the Ouse.

Did my great grandmother ever get to see the sea - or even Kings Lynn? - when she lived in East Rudham?