Among the memorabilia at Cecilia’s Restaurant on 6th and Silver is a rusty New Mexico license plate from 1957.  Apparently the plates in those days had green numbers against a white field, and since the year is embossed in the plate, the DMV must have issued new plates every year in the 50’s.

If you are downtown looking for good New Mexican food, I recommend Cecilia’s. The food is spicy and as close to homemade as you will get in a restaurant. Cecilia’s was even featured on a Food Channel show that was called something like “Dives and Diners on Route 66” a couple of years ago.

I had one of those days with no real breaks. But as I was leaving the office this evening, the full moon, under a veil of thin clouds that obscured its detail, looked like a big city light hovering in the sky.

I generally don’t find doves to be particularly interesting birds. Perhaps it’s because there are so many of them, and the doves that hang out around here are so gray; however, today I got close enough to a dole of doves to notice they have subtle purple in the gray and blue around their eyes.  They also have nice contrasting stripes of white on their tail feathers and in their wings that are visible when they fly, but I only managed to get a blurry tail of a dove as it flew out of my viewfinder. The dole flew all at once, making my autofocus go crazy trying to decide which one to focus on — by the time the focusing system decided to allow the shutter to release, only a dove’s tail remained in the frame.

I replaced the hard drive in my Macbook Pro last night, and restored everything from a backup while we watched a French movie.  My computer had been acting flaky, with lots of pauses and programs not responding. A couple of weeks ago I tried restarting the computer and it wouldn’t come back up, so I booted from the install DVD, fixed disk permissions, then repaired the hard drive. While lots of permissions had gotten out of whack, the disk utility reported nothing wrong with the hard drive. The computer rebooted, but continued to act up, so I replaced the 250 GB drive with a 500 GB drive and everything has been working really well all day.

Laurie’s taking French this semester, so we are watching French movies to improve listening and comprehension. I like French movies because they are made for adults in that they assume the viewer has intelligence and they generally have complex plots, good dialog and excellent cinematography. The silly comedies we’ve seen are funny bet not plain stupid, and the action films are still fairly sophisticated.  We watched D13-U last night, the sequel to Luc Besson’s District 13. It didn’t have as much of the parkour type stunts as the first movie, but it still had a lot of action and it was exciting and suspenseful.  If you are into French films I highly recommend the following: OSS 117: Lost in Rio, Tell No One, Mesrine: Part 1 & 2, Potiche and Priceless.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio is a comedy set in the 70’s,  it is very funny and really has the look and feel of the 70’s. Tell No One is fascinating and has a super complex plot. Mesrine: Part 1 & 2 is about the life of Mesrine, who was France’s public enemy #1 in the 70’s and early 80’s. Potiche, another one set in the late 70’s, is about a trophy wife who ends up running the family’s umbrella factory. Priceless is a modern, French version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I think Rosencrantz was trying to warm his back when I photographed him with the sun starting to rise over his head through the glass this morning. A roadrunner was foraging in a vineyard when I went out to the post office at noon, and I got the sparrow hanging out in a fruit tree when I took out the trash this afternoon.

We woke up to snow and wintery skies. I figured the schools would be delayed and the roads a mess, but once outside of Corrales there was no snow, and it was hardly even wet.  The kitties had to go out first thing and leave paw prints in the snow.

Bob brought me an error message from one of the web apps I wrote for him to create capital improvement projects for public schools. The error read “Can’t do math!”   While matching rooms to the master schedule for a college, I noticed several classes were scheduled in a men’s restroom. Thinking this must be a mistake, I checked the title of the classes, which included “On site pumping methods” and various “Safety” classes. Perhaps they were scheduled in right place after all.

I love the ATM right at the entrance to the adult club. I’d meaning to photograph it for awhile, but the few times I’ve been out and about downtown, I’ve walked on the sunny side of the street.

Laurie and I had been talking about getting a new batch of orchids, but we hadn’t made it out to get any. While she was out with Tristan today, they picked out five beautiful orchids, which where a nice surprise for me when we got home tonight.