Quote of the day

Not like I'm starting a new feature here where I put up a new quote each day. Just like I'm not doing weekly photo summaries. It's just that I followed a link to a news story and could not resist putting up what must be the best quote I have seen in a news story in some time:

"With the exception of the cross-burning episode... I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district," he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.

That cross was burned into his student's ARM, mind you. But hey, exceptions need to be made.

Just a mile from JFK

as the crow flies, or more likely, as the osprey or redwing blackbird flies, sits a wildlife refuge run by the feds. On Monday I was headed back home from J-ka's wedding and doing a one-day-late Father's Day thing with the folks, and none of the open museums seemed all that appealing -- Jewish heritage, Tenement, Native American, it was like "delve into the lives of the oppressed!", and we weren't in that kind of mood. Plus, given the changeable weather and impending thunderstorms, we thought being closer than further to the airport was a good idea. So I popped onto Google Maps and looked for green spaces, a favorite activity of mine back in Oakland (well, with old-school paper maps, but even so), when I would find a green space that was of interest and excurse my way on over. This time, in Feedy's Chelsea office, I found out what the mystery green space was that we'd drive by each week en route to the Coney Island grandparents -- all three of us native New Yorkers (some for almost 7 decades now) and none of us had known. Less than half a mile off the road it was peaceful as could be, and the only motors you could hear were the jet planes periodically taking off overhead (not pictured).
As always, the East Coast nature felt a lot more subtle than West Coast, but if you paid a little attention to what was around you, you were amply rewarded. I'm not sure where we are in terms of wildflower season in Queens, but things here were looking pretty good, if, as so frequently happens, completely unidentifiable.
Well, ok, the above fauna perfectly identifiable as the Parental Pangeans, but it took some concerted internet research to identify this lovely flower as none other than valerian. The swamp version. Oh beloved valerian, most useful of sleep aids! And used to such excellent comic effect in Master and Margarita. If only I had known while walking nearby, I would have paid you the homage that you are due.
More familiar was the beach rose, which was found all over the Guyland when I was growing up-- here in bright pink,
and for some reason apparently more appealing to bugs, (semi) pristine white.
Completely unexpected, by contrast, was prickly pear cactus. In bloom here in West Hollywood right next door, but also in the salt marshes of Queens. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, and my own camera, I wouldn't have believed it.
Many years ago, in the mid-90s, I was taking my then-boyfriend's parents around Berkeley and we ended up in the botanical gardens, one of my favorite spots there. For some reason, his father and I decided that it would be a good idea to snack on one of the appealing prickly pear fruits surrounding us. So juicy! So cute! His mother, a master gardener and botanist, warned us that it would take more cleaning than just a scrape with my Swiss army knife. But we held steadfast and had our way. And spent the next two days removing prickles from around our mouths. Really, not one of my finest moments. Since then I treat this plant, and all of its kind, with the utmost respect, only rarely working up the courage to even order nopales in my taco. Looks all sweet and harmless, doesn't it. Hah.
Less identifiable, and presumably less dangerous, was this daisy-like lovely here. Mom wanted to steal one and plant it at home. But, worried about the feds just down the path in the interpretive center, she refrained.
Chamomile, while still sweet, is common enough to not be so much of a temptation.
And this darling little pink thing looked too delicate to make it all that far in a pocket.
Most appealing of all, at least to those of us with a sense of smell (on this Monday, this apparently meant just me) was the honeysuckle, in full bloom.
The parts of the path that were lined with the vines looked and smelled like nothing but summer.
Honeysuckle isn't so subtle, at least not in an olfactory way, but the local dragonflies were.
And it took a while of walking on the pondside path to realize that the white additions to the gravel were actually shells dropped by the gulls and terns that were all around us in order to get at the clams inside -- some of the shells were nearly intact (not pictured).
This little turtlelet blended in so well with its surroundings that we almost stepped on it. I know it looks visually quite obvious here, but trust me, in the afternoon sun it looked a lot like path.
When we passed it on the way back, it looked kind of scowly. And cowly, now that I'm looking again.
As with the turtle, it could sometimes take a few minutes for a scene to resolve and to understand just what you were looking at. The heron taking flight from the shallows, pretty obvious (not pictured, unfortunately). This grouping of birds, which was kind of far away, less so. With time, and optical + digital zoom, I realized that we were seeing a swan, many Canadian geese, some egrets,
and a bit further out, some cormorants drying off in the sun. Not quite sun, since it was actually overcast and with periodic thunderstorms. So maybe less drying off and more just hanging out. The east coast version is much grayer than the all-black ones I watch on the beaches here.
Did I mention a lot of geese? They crossed the road single file. In a quite long single file. To get to this little marshy spot here -- not clear what made this more appealing than other parts of the park.
A bit nicer to look at and listen to (and probably a bit less crappy) were the redwing blackbirds and the ospreys. The feds let the blackbirds fend for themselves, but the ospreys get their own deluxe wooden platform. There were babies in the nest.
They were noisy. Their parents seemed concerned, although really, without binoculars it's a bit difficult to read the avian facial expression.
Too fast to be captured on film, or in binary code, at least without learning a lot more about aperture manipulation, were the two kinds of swallows flying about. (Insert your own Monty Python joke here, but nb that there were no coconuts in sight, just those clam shells.)

It was a great hour and change, and made me a lot calmer when I was unable to move from standby to boarding for a pre-thunderstorm plane, and when the mid-thunderstorm plane was delayed by almost two hours. Being upgraded to business class helped a bit with that -- reclining seat with footrest for my wee little legs, personal media player, lots of drinkies, multi-course meal apparently designed by Charlie Trotter, hot towels, obsequious staff addressing me by (properly pronounced!) last name, this all made the trip a lot more bearable.

More on my more urban adventures at a later date -- now it's time to call the laundry repair people, because the building dryer won't start, and the dryer is integral to cat hair removal, so this simply will not do...

Brooding

I am taking a break from grading hell to revel in nature. In my girliest girl way, of course, I am not reveling in the nasty, brutish, and short aspects of nature, but rather in the "circle of life continues" maternal and soon-to-be-adorable babies aspect of things.

Which is to say, the nests outside my back door are complete, and I believe eggs must have been laid because what I'm seeing now is two brooding birds. Here's my mourning friend, whose nest I guess is not between the boxes and Gatorade as I had last claimed, but rather on the boxes and just next to the Gatorade. I suddenly feel like Grover in a Sesame Street sketch.

Less visible yesterday afternoon was my as-yet-unidentified tiny brown friend (with whom I feel a distinct affinity, being myself smallish and brown and not easily identified by the casual observer).
How she's brooding with her butt in the air (shaking it like she just don't care?) is beyond me. But hopefully it's working.

Genug with bird observations -- it's time to finish up grading my finals. This exam took up all of my Monday (with the giving and the grading) and all of yesterday (with the first TA arriving at 9:50 in the am and the last TA leaving at 9:02 in the pm) and now a good part of my morning. I am so over this exam I can't even tell you...

This week in photos

Not really. I just liked the sound of it, kind of Time Magazine-esque, or maybe it’s People? What I’ve got here, really, is merely three photos from this week. Actually, just from yesterday. So maybe this post should have been called “Yesterday in photos.” Although then that sounds like some kind of rigorous and full-blown photographic documentation of my entire day. So maybe really this should just be called “Three entertaining photos I took yesterday.”

Enough with the meta and the rambling.

It was a bit on the chilly side yesterday morning, so the piggies apparently felt compelled to huddle together for warmth. On the fake fur, no less. This is how it looked from one side of the bed,

and this is how it looked from the foot of the bed.

I wonder sometimes if these are fractal patterns, or meant to be meaningful symbols, or if maybe they took geometry lessons on how shapes fit together. Here’s a well-done moment from about a month ago, minus Fatty.

Just a few inches between the decorative pillows and the edge of the bed, yet there they sit. Lie. Whatever.You can barely tell that Wethead is there, really. He’s particularly adept at wrapping himself around and thereby immobilizing warm bodies. I too have been a victim. More than once.

A bit after those first two pictures were taken, I headed over to one of the cafes that I like to work at, this one in Hollywood proper. As I looked for a meter to lock my bike to, I came across this here.

All my years of biking in various cities here and there, hither and yon, not to mention the serial dating of bike messengers back in the day, and this was a first. Piquant! Or maybe the bike was in trouble and was headed to the big house…

Baby birds (to be)

Oops. Looks like I accidentally went on a two-week hiatus. Plenty of stuff going on, lots to report on, but somehow didn't. I think it's mostly due to my participation in a conference last week, a well-known conference in my field where I was a plenary for the first time in the US. It was me and three other plenaries, all of whom, unlike me, are full professors (I think I may have mentioned this before), and I was nervous as anything in the weeks leading up to my big talk, and had a bit of a nervous hangover for a few days after, I think. Anyway, writing and editing and entertainment energy was kind of focused on that. (It went well, for those of you wondering by this point. I had a major crisis of faith about 10 minutes before I went on, at which point I decided I had gone off the deep end and should rewrite the entire talk, which is a little further afield than my usual stuff. But soldiered through and the response was really positive, more positive than anything else I've done to date, I think. Which is, of course, based in part on the selection-and-elevation principle -- my talk was better and more meaningful and more worth paying attention to because I was rock-star-esque (and really, I mean -esque). It had been pre-decided that what I had to say had Merit, and so it was easy for my listeners to decide so at the time. Even so, all the nice things people said made me really quite happy.)

Anyway, I'm mostly recovered and doing a lot of "get it together" type things this weekend. Like the sweeping and mopping and cleaning and subsequent major rearrangement of clothes. And cooking and going to comedy shoes. I have no music player these days other than my computer (must get iPod like object and a dock, really, what am I in, 2001?) and it doesn't quite reach all the way to the kitchen. But I have been doing kitchen cleaning to the lovely music of mourning dove wingbeats and the sweet song of this little birdie here, which at some point who can tell these tiny brown birds apart? I have given up.
Little Brownielet and its partner (although I'm only seeing one at a time) are tantalizing Fatty, who is spending a lot of time on the ledge of the kitchen window staring up and out, by means of flying frequently from the roof across the way (pictured above) to the gutter pipe just above and to the right of my kitchen window in order to build a wee little nest.
The mourning doves, meanwhile, work mostly in a pair, and are building a nest just next door, in a slightly less scenic perch.
Yes, that's my next-door neighbor's air conditioner, and the nest is lodged between three gatorade bottles (empty, and stored there why?) and what look like empty electronics boxes.

I am excited for the onset of baby birds! (In main part because I am not Colliculus.) Soon they will be chirping right above my kitchen window. "But Pangea," you say, "so early. Won't that bother you?" But please do not forget that I am already up. And even if I'm not, maybe they'll drown out the horrible and nearly endless throat-clearing-and-spitting regimen that I can hear around 6 every morning from the Russki apartment downstairs. Feh. Compared to that, chirping birdies will be a delightful change of pace. My one concern is that the stairwell between these two nests is my main way to go down and do laundry, which is in the basement downstairs. Will I end up with angry and defensive birds dive-bombing me as I innocently attempt to pass just below? Or can we all live together in peace? Only time will tell, I guess. Plus I'm not going to count my mourning doves before they are hatched...