Word of the week.

While I'm here, let me add my word of the week, which was:

amorphous

I picked myself up using the same word multiple times in classes and in comments on student papers - from describing the work of the "Misty" poets to commenting on the state of the papers themselves.

When you spend your weeks continually grasping for words in front of an audience, you notice yourself forming new speech habits all the time. Some of them you can't get rid of too quickly - like my repeated use of "if you will" to end my off-the-top-of-my-head descriptions of poetic or historical tendencies in lectures this term - a habit that has irritated me but been difficult to shake off. Do the students notice? I doubt most are listening anyway.

Yes, some of my lectures this term have been quite amorphous. But just one more week to go.

Tree monkeys

The wildlife in my garden this summer...


Now the trees are bare, and my lawn is covered in leaves.

Sqnowcat

Squid in the snow.

Snow day!

We're having a large snowfall here that has closed the university again today (woo hoo!). Yesterday morning we all stared at our mobile phones hoping for that automated message, but it didn't come and we all dutifully trecked to work. When I came out of my first class and was gearing up for the always last minute rush for the second, longer one, I opened my email and discovered they'd decided to close after all from 2 p.m., the start time of that class. And there was great rejoicing.

Crazy woman across the street

I took my cat for a walk tonight. And he went with me, harnessed and leashed, quite happily trotting along by my side. I'd always suspected he might be suited to it, but was too embarrassed to try. Still, I'm pretty sure we've already convinced the neighbours that we're strange and foreign, since we've been taking the cats out into the back garden with harnesses and tie-outs for a few months now, and I’ve spent a good deal of time running in circles round the apple tree dragging lures behind me. It's a small step from that to final certifiable cat-walking insanity, though notably I still needed the cover of darkness to try it. It was an entirely lovely experience.

In fact, for the past two or three weeks I’ve been taking both cats out into the garden morning and evening without harnesses, having discovered that one isn’t too quick at working out how to climb over the fence (though he makes daily forays into the apple tree, from which he has to be rescued), and the other is generally happy to sit around watching things pass by. They like being out there, and I want them to get that exercise and stimulation as much as possible - but if I can find a compromise that stops them being squished by a car or rejoining that huge lost cat population we glimpsed when we were adopting, I’ll take it. Even if I do look crazy.

Storm

We had a sudden storm on Monday night. It's nothing unusual here - thunder and lightning is common on summer afternoons and evenings, though there seems to have been more this year than most. As a result things have been unusually lush and green, though the sun has begun to bake the grass yellow in the last couple of weeks.

Monday's storm came through at about 10 at night. We could hear the wind and sudden heavy rain, and then the lights started to flicker on and off before going out altogether. I haven't been in a power-cut worthy of the name since I was a child, so it was exciting to light candles and brush my teeth by torchlight and worry about whether the fish in the freezer would all have to be barbecued the next day and where I could possibly have put my battery powered radio. Unfortunately, it was a little too close to bedtime to enjoy it to the full. Lying in bed and watching the lightning through the blinds was fun, though. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with the bedside light shining in my eyes.

Afterwards I looked at Denver Post reports about the damage caused, including this one this morning. I thought that they must be somewhat sensationalized, going on about fallen trees and windows being blown out of buildings just a few roads west of here - after all, the only effects visible in my garden were some extra bits of next-door's tree scattered around my lawn, and my tomato plant knocked a little askew. However, we learned otherwise when went for a bike ride along the Clear Creek Trail, a trail from Denver to Golden that passes to the north of us through a particularly nice wooded area by a small river - part of Wheat Ridge's green belt. The path was officially closed due to "hazardous conditions," and there were fallen trees everywhere - uprooted, snapped in two, lying over the path or in the river. There was one resting on the corner of some unfortunate person's roof nearby. At some points the path was carpeted with fallen leaves, giving a whole new meaning to the term "green belt."




There is a "no swimming" sign planted by some of the small lakes that this path goes past.


I like the way that it manages to look as if it's OK to swim, as long as you don't expect to be happy. Or, Beware of Octopus.

California

The sea, the sea!

Last month we took a brief trip to California. I was giving a paper at a conference in Orange County, and we stayed on for a couple of days to see Los Angeles and its environs.

We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.

We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:

Overall, it seems untenable. There are lanes and lanes of cars on freeway after freeway, all those people going in the same direction but individually powered by a non-renewable resource. There's no point in calling for more public transport in such a place; either technology has to change, or the whole place will be left an abandoned monument to the strange way people used to live. Somehow it was easy to imagine distant generations marvelling over a deserted landscape of huge empty roads.

Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.

By the pier at Santa Monica, the sea was dotted with strange seal-people bobbing up and down in the water:


And sitting on the railings at the end of the pier, we saw this juvenile pelican, with its beautiful beady eyes.

We also went to the Getty, where I was happy to come across James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels. Afterwards we took a quick drive through the Hollywood area. Once is enough! In spite of being right next to all those residential areas of the rich, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a grimy tourist strip that you can see for yourself if you imagine Oxford Street and then add in the worst of the souvenir shops on the Royal Mile.