Quick note

Just a quick note to tell you that I've started yet another blog.  This one is entirely for photographs that I take.  Just as the poetry professor or art teacher inevitably dabbles themselves, among my enthusiasms is photography.  I don't have any lofty aspirations in the form, but it's something I enjoy and thought it might be fun to have a place to house my own photos.

So go check it out, follow it if you'd like, and enjoy!

http://thefirsttenthousand.blogspot.com/

In which I throw out a few more photos for the illusion of maintaining this blog

For want of any real blog-worthy material, I thought I might indulge in one of my photo updates.  The video above was my accidental discovery of the video recorder function on my new camera while attempting to take a still photo.  If I'm not mistaken, it is the first time I've ever uploaded a video onto the internet.  In it, you can see what Ginger and Lil' Chompy are like if you were to look at them on our couch for approximately 1 second. 

Napoleon was kind enough to pose for a piece I'm calling Cat Owner's Nightmare.

 But the real news of the week is our new dining room table.  You may ask, "Didn't you have a dining room table already?" 

Funny thing about that.  As all glassmakers know, one of the interesting properties of glass is that even a very sturdy, well made, and heavy piece of glass tapped just in the right spot with the right force will break or shatter.  Anyone with the most rudimentary eduction in slapstick can probably fill in the rest of the story for yourself.  I would add that I was always on the fence about that glass table anyway.  It was nice, well made, and slick to be sure, but there was something in the design that always struck me as being dated specifically in the 1990s.  This modest mahogany piece is a bit more timeless in my eye and, I daresay, more copacetic to the established flow of our home's decor.


 

An extraordinarily photo-heavy Christmas post.

 

I thought it might be nice to post many, many photos from Christmas here at the Mathers house.

Here's Laurie with many food item gifts.  She received a lot of food item gifts.  I received a lot of beverage item gifts, mainly orbiting the spheres of coffee, tea, and wine.

My folks were in town and Tony joined us for presents and the Christmas meal.

I received the complete Jeeves and Wooster television series. I should mention that the obvious exclusion from these photos is the brand new digital camera that my parents gave me.  I suppose I could have worked something up with mirrors, but there are no photos of the camera itself.

A "french press" style coffee maker.

A pair of Freudian slippers.  That is to say slippers made to look like the head of Dr. Freud.

My toes operate the tongues.

I bought a ring for Laurie.  Gold and amethyst.

Laurie also received a cookbook.

Karina made a quilt for Laurie.  Some of the patches are from Laurie's mother's clothes.

Tony and Karina bought me a tea set.

I also received a wine aerator.

And we mocked nature at the expense of poor Schubert.

In the Brief Midwinter

I wanted to post a few photographs from our recent life.  The damp and cold weather occasioned a mushroom growing in the knot of a tree across the street from our house, giving rise to hilarity and mirth on the part of Laurie and I. 

We went and purchased a Christmas tree a few days ago.  I believe this is our first Silvertip.  I think it looks very striking and elegant.

Also, we have our new couch.

Minutiae

There have been a few small additions to our house in the past two weeks which I thought I would take a moment to mention, especially as they are all little things, the sort that so often go unnoticed but which, in fact, make up the bulk of our lives.  On our front porch, we have a ceramic cardinal (of the avian variety, not the Roman Catholic.  Apologies for the washed out quality of the photo.  In September the light changes and one of my two cameras seems to be in the moribund way.)  I was given this statuary to my great delight.  I brought it home and placed it atop Laurie's writing desk.  I knew it was far to garish for indoor decor, but would suit our garden area nicely.  I thought I would get a rise out of Laurie by initially placing it in the house in a major focal point.

As is so often the case, it went completely unnoticed in that spot the following day.  So, right before work, I called Laurie to a position where the cardinal was directly to the right behind my head in her view and said, "You ever have one of those moments where there was something you didn't see and someone points it out to you?  And then you can never unsee it?  Like a ceramic cardinal?"

Laurie staggered a bit and braced herself.  She said it was as if I'd conjured the thing out of thin air.

Also in my haul of bird effigies was the eagle you see here.  It lives on the shelf above my desk.  But I was more interested in pointing out to you the book set in the center of the photo.  It is Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust which I am planning on diving into sometime early next year.  Yes, while simultaneously working through the Harvard Classics.

What's this now?!!?  The wine rack is filling!  At the suggestion of a shoppie, we bought Emergence which is a cuvée from the central California coast.  48% Syrah, 29% Mourvèdre, 23% Grenache.  Brooding and earthy boasts the label.

Really we need to start entertaining to give an opportunity for me to write reports on these wines.

A Wine Rack, You Say?!!?

It's been a while since I've had a picture post (and, it's been a while since I've had a short post.) Here's something new!

This is the top of our pantry cabinet in our kitchen.  Laurie has been making the house even more beautiful while I've been working nights.  I don't make a lot of demands about our home.  I told Laurie, back when I proposed to her, that she could do whatever she wanted with the house.  But it occurred to me recently that we ought to own a wine rack.  Laurie concurred and we bought the one pictured. It was fairly inexpensive and, I thought, a lovely addition to our kitchen.

I came to the decision that we ought to have one mainly over the bottle of port in the foreground of the lower picture.  If you can't read the inscription, it was inscribed to Laurie and I by Rob and Jess as a wedding gift to be opened on our 25th anniversary. It was the catalyst for obtaining a wine rack as I want to make sure it's properly stored on its side.

So, Laurie and I may have a new, modest hobby.  I think Rob would have been happy to know that.  We thought we might, when we are able, get a nice bottle every once in a while and have a little rack for special occasions.  I think we both also like the fence that this particular rack sets.  We can have eight.  Plus the freestanding black cat Reisling.

Weary of Time

Like a metaphor from a short story taught in high school literature class, sunflowers are growing in our basil patch that we don't really remember having planted.  Our unexpected sunflowers are beautiful.  The one above is at its peak and bees find it highly attractive.  We think maybe we planted them when Tony brought home the plants from his Ag class, which means they were dormant for over a year.  When they fade, we plan on harvesting the seeds and planting as many as we can around the perimeter of our property.

One of the big pieces of news in my life is that my 400 day weekend is drawing to a close.  Next week I begin work again.

Gina got a chihuahua.  She's named him Lil' Chompy which, I am told, is short for his full name: Gnome Chompsky (which is doubly funny because Gina is a Linguistics major.)  Last night they brought him over to meet us.

That's about all I have to report for now or, at least, all I want to report.  It's been a very rough week for me, but there are certainly some bright patches.

Our trip to Sacramento

We went to Sacramento for the past few days.  Again, we didn't tell you we were leaving town in order to remove any temptation you may have had to burglarize our house.  I spent a lot of the last few days in a chair in the lobby with coffee and a book:

Laurie had a conference.  I went mainly with the purpose of seeing the Capitol building and taking pictures of older buildings in Sacramento. On the first full day, I set out to do all of that, but found that Sacramento, especially around the Capitol, is all metered parking. In a rare instance of lack of foresight on my part, I had only a dime and a few pennies on me. Also, Sacramento's traffic, rough atmosphere (at least in that neighborhood,) and grid of one way streets all worked to incline me back to the hotel. I did see the Capitol building several times as I drove around the blocks surrounding it and it is impressive. I probably could have planned that project a little better. So, that's why I don't have great, sweeping pictures of the Capitol, stories of meeting high state officials, being transfigured by the beauty of the state trees in the Capitol mall, finding a long forgotten letter by John Steinbeck that had been secreted in the pages of a book in the California State Library for the past 50 years.  Instead, I scurried back to the hotel like a cockroach.

I did quite a bit of walking and wandering around the neighborhood of the hotel, but all of the surrounding area looked like this:

Really, I could have turned in any direction on my walks and taken a picture and it would have looked very much like the picture above. 

Here is me in front of an immensely fake elephant.  I imagine the artist had in mind that Scotty tied one on and got the coordinates wrong when teleporting an elephant and transported it halfway into a rock wall.  It is a gruesome death.

We ate at The Elephant Bar, which was directly across the street from our hotel, for almost every meal.  Being a vegetarian, I did not try the elephant.

I think we were infinitely happier when we resolved ourselves to the mundane in our free time.  A lot of our free time looked like the photo above. I finished Ben Franklin's autobiography (see previous post) and most of a book by William Penn (see forthcoming post.)  I walked to the mall and was accosted by salespeople who buffed one of my thumbnails until it shone like it was polished. It's still remarkably shiny and I keep staring at it like a magpie. I had not in thirty-three years of life ever had a moment of discontent over the state of my fingernails up to that point.

All in all, it was a good trip in spite of how much money we spent on food. I got bad marks in Frugality every day of the trip and my presence was probably superfluous although I like to think that my wife enjoys my company. But we did have fun; I got a lot of reading done, I got a lot of thinking done, I possibly have a tangible job prospect from the trip, I got to remind myself why I never watch televised news, Laurie and I listened to salsa music and watched fireworks from the State Fairgrounds and saw ducklings, and now I have a shiny thumb.  

The Rest of the Weekend

The real reason we took a trip down south this weekend was the wedding of my friends David and Mindy (see photo above.)  They were married on Saturday in Ojai at what I gather was a yogic retreat center.  Laurie and I were, I believe, the only guests coming from the north.  We passed through acres upon acres of oil rigs down Highway 33 which I didn't even know existed.  We saw many things, wonderful to speak of, in our travels. 

Mindy and David had an unconventional wedding which included sawing a log in half together, breaking a geode, taking shots, poetry, music, and shooting wine glasses.  Here you can see the happy couple leaving the site of the ceremony with their guns on their backs.

We stayed for several hours afterward and visited with many old friends.  Unfortunately, my camera's flash went on the blitz, so that part of our trip's preservation relies solely on our memory.  So it goes.

We left and drove late at night down to my parent's house in Orange County.  KUSC, the world class classical music station that the LA area boasts, played a modern serious composition show which suited the late night drive surprisingly well.  As a side note, I had my usual fits of jealousy over LA's excellent 24 hour classical music station.  At one point I gasped and scared poor Laurie as she was driving when I heard an advertisement for their weekly broadcast of the Los Angeles Opera.

However, traffic on our way home from LA cured me of any romanticizing I may have been doing over the area.

It's always a little jarring for me to return to the area where I grew up for a number of reasons.  One is the memories, but also the dissonance of the past and the future converging in an unexpected present.  For example, the convenience store where I bought Lemonheads as a child now carrying soda cups advertising Facebook aps.  Or my childhood home with several rooms added on to it.

Here's Laurie and my Mom on my parent's porch next to Mom's fairy garden.

We ate a lot on the trip.  The two photos above were taken at our meal with my grandmother in downtown Orange (after which we went to my alma mater as you who read my previous post well know.)  We went almost immediately after lunch to dinner with my father for Father's Day.

It's always such a joy to spend time with my parents.  I love them dearly.  Laurie and I dragged our feet when it came time to leave.

Highlights of the trip were: the wedding, the food at the wedding (which Laurie says is the best food she's ever eaten and I don't think that's an unfair assessment), reconnecting with old friends, the drive through the mountains, me forgetting to pack Laurie's clothes that she had picked for the wedding, the meals with my family, the visit to my old college, our battery failing and my father having to come out to my grandmother's house to replace it, eating a spicy dark chocolate-chili cupcake, our bi-yearly exposure to the Food Network, my mother's cat Bugsy's befriending of Laurie, a huge traffic jam on the Grapevine which actually closed just after we passed through due to a brush fire which went right up to the side of the freeway,

My Alma Mater

So, this weekend, Laurie and I took a secret trip down to Los Angeles (we didn't do anything particularly secret.  We've just learned that announcing to the world on social media that we will be away from our house for several days may not be the wisest tool to use from our box of life-choices.)  I'll have more on what we did specifically throughout the weekend in a forthcoming post (the other camera with pictures from the rest of the weekend is in Laurie's purse and she is at work, so I thought I would do this post right now.)  On Sunday afternoon, Laurie, my grandmother and I took a trip to my alma mater, the Nourishing Mother of my education, the campus of Chapman University in the city of Orange, California. 

Chapman University is a top tier private university.  As much as I like to beat the autodidact drum, I really do have a degree from an excellent university.  Part of the reason I wanted to visit the campus on Sunday was, of course, nostalgia.  But another reason was to take pictures of the buildings to show you here on my blog.  I absolutely love the architecture of Chapman.  Besides being an excellent university, it also boasts an excellent campus.

Here is the theater and visual arts building where I spent the lion's share of my time as a student (you'll note the bust of my beloved Mozart in the foreground.)  I believe it's the only building on campus that is actually ivy covered.  The darker building to the right is the large theater for the use of the theater department in educational or performance needs (seats about 250.)  The lighter, smaller building to the left is the Guggenheim Gallery where many of my close friends had art shows, poetry readings, experimental music concerts and so forth.  Down the hall between the buildings lie the classrooms and the small black box theater (seats about 30ish) where I performed my one-man show The Phoenix in my Senior year.

Here's the view if you turn about sixty degrees to your left from the photo above.  It looks down toward the library on the left, the stadium straight ahead.

Here is the Music building which is called Oliphant Hall.  It's a newer building.  The Music Department is one of Chapman's more celebrated disciplines (a list which also includes Film, Law, Business, Religion and, in full awareness of my natural bias on the topic, I would say Theater and Dance as well.)  I used to sit on a bench outside of the windows and listen to people practicing their art within.  I especially remember someone, I never learned who, over the course of two months practicing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue every day during my lunch hour.  They had no idea how much pleasure I derived from hearing their gradual improvement.

This is the building in the front courtyard by Glassell and University Drive.  I think it's the Psych department.

Here is Memorial Hall.  Over to the left (just out of frame) would be the window to the President's office (my grandmother wanted me to mention that she watches and enjoys his television show regularly.)  Within the building is also a 900 seat theater which would be used for major campus events.  I met Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, and Edward Albee at different times in that building.

Ah, here is the lovely, new Leatherby Library.  I spent a lot of time in the earlier incarnation of that building.  I think the new one is gorgeous and contained within is a world class university library.  The fountain outside is also new.

This is also new.  This is the All Faiths Chapel.  It's huge!  Much to my chagrin, it has been locked every time I've tried to visit, but I can look in the door and see a gloriously large, white, minimalistic chapel.  You can take a virtual tour on their website.

A few words on the sculpture integrated into the campus: there is a great deal of wonderful modern sculpture around the campus (I'm told that one of Chapman's key contributors, George Argyros, is an avid modern sculpture aficionado) which compliments the post-modern, eclectic architectural styles of the buildings nicely.  Whoever is planning the Chapman Campus is doing a fantastic job.

I will say one thing that isn't a critique so much as an observation.  I feel that they are at bust capacity.  I noticed a lot of busts around campus, probably twice as many as when I attended a mere decade ago.  There are nearly 30 now and I think if they get any more they will approach clutter.  As it stands they are a nice compliment to the aura of the campus, projecting a fine collegiate atmosphere and focal points for the students to aspire toward.  Although, some I am decidedly delighted to have on that campus (Mozart, Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Puccini, Ella Fitzgerald) while others I am highly disappointed that someone felt that they were worthy of enshrining (Ayn Rand?  Really?)  Still, the key placement of Albert Schweitzer as the sort of "campus centerpiece" has always been a point of pride for me.

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Here is that lovely fountain between the library and the music building.

Finally, Chapman is an old campus.  It was established in 1861 (although it wasn't established in its present location until the early 1950s.)  The picture below did not enjoy the good focus of the rest of our visit, but I included it to show the wonderful old tree outside of the theater building, under which I sat studying for many hours.  For size comparison, Laurie and my grandmother are the two figures to the right.

I would recommend Chapman to anyone.  It is one of the finest private universities on the West Coast.  It is also one of the more pleasant places to visit in Orange County.