Here it is May 1st, which means there’s only ten days felt before we leave for France. In the meantime, we have finals to study for, backup watering systems to finish, salsa dance on Friday and work. The kitties were lying around reflecting this afternoon as was a band’s tour bus that I moved my car for so it could take my usual parking spot this afternoon.
Sadly, the 2013 Institute For Medieval Studies’ Spring Lecture Series is over. The final lecture was “Holy Terrors: Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings” by Janetta Rebold Benton of Pace University. Ms. Rebold Benton’s lecture was wonderful, with a lot of great photos of gargoyles and grotesques (non-water spouting gargoyles). I had never though about it before, but true gargoyles are water spouts that drain roofs, and the name is derived the same root word that gives us the term “gargle”.
We got home very late from a wonderful reception celebrating the conclusion of this years lecture series, so I only took time to process a photo of a Lotus Elise that was in the parking lot when I left the office, heading to the Lecture series last night.
The two lectures tonight on “The Uses of Norse Mythology” by Rory McTurk, University of Leeds and “”Real’ Monsters: Medieval Belief, Wonder, and the Wonders of the East” were fantastic.
Water was turned into the irrigation ditch 5 weeks ago, and after more than a dozen attempts to irrigate, I finally got every irrigated yesterday. I had gotten up between 2:00 am and 4:00 am every morning since last Saturday, went out with the monsters, and attempted to irrigate 3 times before I got everything watered. I also got a decent shot of the Big Dipper in the pitch blackness in the early morning.
A couple of the photos are somewhat monstrous today, with a monsterously strange car with a v-twin engine in front of the radiator, but I only got a partial shot of it from a quick drive-by I snapped as I crossed Central on my way to class. I also discovered that a host of “light demons” had attacked my camera on one of my shots of the lecture of the Staffordshire Hoard on Tuesday night, after I downloaded the photos from my second camera tonight.
Since I am up past midnight, I thought I’d be clever and go out and see if I could get irrigation water since the ditch rider just turned it in to our ditch for the week. All the water was already taken. The farmers above us probably leave their gates down so when the ditch rider turns the water in, the farmers upstream of us will be sure to get it. The license plate on this old Corvair says it all!
For those of you who are old enough, and have good memories, the Corvair was on par with the Devil in Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at any Speed” published in 1965. The only reason I remember it is because we had one of “The Sporty Corvair-The One-Car Accident” as per Nader’s title of Chapter One in “Unsafe at any Speed”. The Covair is long gone, but our evil, water guzzling plants remain, and the Conservancy is making Corrales farmers fight for water, leaving us with “No Agua” for three weeks at a time.
The “Check Engine Light” came on in our Mazda Speed 3 this afternon. I stopped and reseated the gas cap and checked the oil, and everything seemed ok. We had just filled the car with gas, so I suspected the gas cap didn’t get seated well enough. I took the car by Auto Zone and they got the code for me which gave use an error that there was a “Large Vacuum Leak” meaning the gas cap didn’t seat properly.
As I was walking back to my car after class, a young couple were playing guitars by the statue of “Mexican dancers” on the mall between Popejoy Hall and Johnson Gym. I noticed the young man was playing a flamenco guitar with pegs instead of machine heads to secure and tune the strings. Tuning pegs are rarely seen on guitars these days, so I asked the young man about his guitar. He said he got it from John Truitt and that is was made in Albuquerque by a local luthier in the 1970’s. That was really cool to learn, because I’ve known Truitt for many years, and he is like Mr. Music — you can give Truitt anything with a string on it and he’ll produce great music on it.
When I pulled into the parking lot at work, the was a young woman photographing a man and his daughter. I pointed out other locations in the downtown area that were good for portraits. They were friendly and cheerful and it made me happy to see they were having lots of fun with their photo shoot.
Sarah, who’s in French 385 with Lauie and I, and French 302 with Laurie, organized a fun night at Wilson Middle School with four or five other students for their senior project in Communications. It was really well attended, we had to park a block from the school, the food was good and the kids looked like they were having a lot of fun participating in art, science, poetry, etc. The 5th photo is of her team calling out numbers for a raffle.
On my way home from getting the engine light checked, a crew was filming at the Corrales gas station, so I pulled over and got a few shots. I have no idea what movie or show they were filming.
Laurie pointed out the spider in the last photo after she got home. It looks like spider season is coming on, so the macro lens is coming out.
This Porsche 911 was parked out in front of Cafe Giuseppe this morning with a terrier waiting expectantly in the front seat for its owner. The chopper was parked in front of a really ugly car, so I removed the car.
Jesse’s Coffee Hub in Corrales is offering Gelato Burritos — if you are feeling adventurous, the triple venti, gluten free, chocolate, orange barrel crush with sausage, bacon, double cheese, eggs, spam, spam, eggs and spam is pretty tasty. I noticed while I was trying to get my dumb phone to read the DR Code on the back of a DIGBY truck, the driver was taking the idea of an orange barrel crush literally. Another sign that spring is almost here: more people are strolling around downtown enjoying the mild temperature in the late afternoon light.
I barely caught this old car restored as a lowrider as it drove past on Route 66 in downtown Albuquerque this afternoon. One of the nice things about living in the desert is that we see a lot of classic cars on the road.
This was really a Garfield Monday — between dealing with dead computers, staff panics, kernel panics, intermittent mice and funky variables, I think Bruce and I managed to get a little bit of work done. I drive by the window in the last photo almost daily, and never really paid much attention to it, until tonight when I noticed it looked like an aquarium.
Taxi 127 was driving pretty wild tonight — maybe the passenger was in labor or something. Continuing my new, scenic routes to and from my new parking spot, I wanted to photograph this door for the past couple of nights, but there were some rough looking characters hanging around in front of the door, and I didn’t want to see what their reactions would be to me either asking them to move, or be in the photo since I couldn’t really see what they were involved in. The installation of sheets on the wall in the pocket park I photographed last night turned out to be quite colorful in the daylight.
We lost our parking spots again, so now I’m parking in the block north of Gold and south of Central between 2nd and 3rd Streets. The parking spot gives me a new point of view, and now I am going in and leaving by the front door — an entrance and exit I haven’t made for almost 15 years.
Off Center & Not Even 