a lunch outing

I've been to the old mining town of Madrid - about forty five minutes south west of us - numerous times over the last thirty years, but for whatever reason have never been to the Mine Shaft Tavern before.  Well, ok, I've always thought it was a bikers' pub, and I'm sure that there are times when it is, but we'd agreed to meet friends for lunch there today (a green chile buffalo burger!) which, though our spirits were dampened and darkened by the news coming out of Minneapolis, was excellent.  And the atmosphere was more like a regular old style English pub (bar, dark panelling, lots of dark wood tables and chairs - though admittedly English pubs tend not to have cut out cowboys and cowgirls marking the way to the restrooms.  In any case, it was a sanitized, but very visitable, version of a rustic/mining saloon, minus the sawdust, the cussing, and the horses (though there was a stuffed buffalo head).

That sullen looking sky?  There's likely some snow on the way ...

 

it's our room

Actually, I honestly thought that it was my study.  But apparently arguing with these two isn't an option.  I retreated. 

Well, obviously I didn't.  What with graduate admissions business, and a million and thirty letters of recommendations suddenly being asked for, and and and, the semester seems to have begun, even if it technically hasn't.

 

 

from the front door: morning, evening

It would, of course, be a lie to say that I'd forgotten what the semester is like - and in any case, it's not the semester, yet.  But that being said ... it's the Monday of the week before the semester, and emails kept thudding into my inbox, needing to be dealt with.  It has not been a quiet day: the sky maintains, nonetheless, some semblance of tranquility.

 

and onto the next season

It's not even Epiphany yet, and our little local supermarket seems to have decided that, yes, bzzzzz, it's time to get ready for Valentine's day ...

 

breakfast light

Honestly, waking up to this morning's news sent us running straight off for breakfast at Harry's (it helped that their "plato tipico," which includes eggs scrambled with nopales, and black beans, was on the menu).  It's not that I'm a Maduro supporter far from it: nasty crook.  But this latest action on the part of our regime is - in addition to being a major distraction from the Epstein files - what shall we say? - not the way to go about it.  It's as though DT thought: well, if I can't get a Peace Prize (except a chocolate coin covered in gold foil from FIFA), I'll get a War Prize.  So what next?  

 

beady eyes

Downtown: an excellent lunch with friends at La Boca (this bead and whatsits store is next door) before heading with them to see the Gustave Baumann exhibition at the NM Museum of Art.  I thought I knew Baumann's work fairly well - probably everyone in and around Santa Fe thinks so - beautiful, slightly mannered, often slightly over-bright complex woodcuts of the city and landscape nearby; of Taos Pueblo, the Grand Canyon, the Californian coast, and so on.  But I wasn't expected to be surprised by his versatility, including his abstract, or near-abstract works: these turquoise eyes are staring out of a corner in Curiosity Killed the Cat (1951), which the wall panel (the wall panels were very hit or miss in their interpretations) tells us "infers [the writer presumably means "implies"] that an undue interest in modernism might be dangerous."  Or it might be that Baumann liked painting black cats: it wasn't the only one.

This view onto an inner courtyard captures the at-one-moment raining, at-one-moment sunny nature of the day: the mountains were covered in a wonderful dusting of snow,

and later, the racing bands of dark clouds made for the first spectacular sunset of the year.

 

the ubiquitous mailbox crows of Eldorado

Let me be clear - we don't have one ourselves.  But if there's any local vernacular art - local to Eldorado itself - it's surely oriented around mailboxes: painted, personalized, and yes - in a number of cases - adorned with tin crows.  Sometimes, indeed, there's a real live crow instead, but they tend to flap away.  This one seems to have a shiny glass lozenge in its beak: I can't tell (given that it's New Year's Day) whether that's a piece of festive decoration, or an attempt to make this particular corvid stand out from the flock.