breakfast counter top

A cheerful sight, setting me up for a long day of meetings ... one more such day to go, tomorrow ... And yes, that is Moth, in the background, photo-bombing, as usual ...

at last!

The jacarandas are in bloom!  They are really late this year - it's been - for LA - a chilly spring.  But here they are.  It MUST be the end of the semester!! (and indeed, graduation is flowering all over campus, too).

the annual rose-sniffing portrait

No, alas, not our roses - which have all either been picked by rose thieves or eaten by a marauding squirrel.  We can't decide which - but in reality, probably an animal.  We don't have deer here, though - or at least, not climbing a fence and clambering up steps in our front yard - not when there are tempting blooms like these in nearby streets, anyway.  Deer would have been the most probable culprit ... But these are very fine blooms and, each year, force us to stop and sniff.

hawky

Straight outside our bedroom window this morning - proudly indifferent to being observed (I'm sure that he knew we were there).  He was there - after we'd spotted him - for at least ten minutes, before swooping off for a morning's hunting.  Most of the hawks around here are red-tailed hawks: my own thinking (but those of you who know better, please correct me!) is that this is a juvenile Cooper's Hawk - that's based on the beautiful brown and cream breast markings, very like an English song thrush.  

morning light

It's wonderful to be greeted by light like this when we come upstairs in the morning (the house, since it's built on a hillside, is upside down - the communal spaces and kitchen are on top; bedrooms and studies down below ...).  Note, however, that the most exquisitely lit object in the living room is, inevitably, a kitty scratching post.

LA river

It's great to see water in the river.  And it was great to walk across it this evening (a way to find parking whilst eating good Mexican food and drinking even better cocktails at Salazar) and really take it on board, slowly.  Our house is probably up there, somewhere, near the horizon - on the other hand, given our habits of electricity conservation, possibly not very visible.  In any case, it's a still, warm, Southern Californian early May night.

getting to work

At the end of their first year, our PhD students in Art History have to do a presentation in front of the whole faculty, and then answer questions.  It's meant to involve a close reading of a particular art object/image - together with an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and so on.  At best, it's like a min-conference - and it's always great to hear where students' interests and passions lie.  But not everyone brings in items for show and tell from inter-library loan ... in this case, a completely compelling advertising/how-to manual from Yale Silk Works.  Though the (fascinating) talk was about late C19th American crazy quilting, this particular YSW publication was all about how to make paper flowers.  That is, it gave very elaborate instructions about how to cut and arrange tissue paper petals and leaves - beautifully ignoring the fact that it was also advertising the fact that one could buy kits of exactly these materials, ready-cut ...