Thursday Afternoon… Still fooling around with light…  I parked the car (left the bicycle at home) and walked to my volunteer job at the Museum of Photographic Arts.  The Museum of Man is the central image.  Today I’ve posted images that I earlier would have discarded.  The Australian Tea Tree is very much alive although it looks dead.  We had an unusually hard wind a couple of days ago, and there are several trees blown down in Balboa Park. 

Photographs at the end of the Day:  I'm trying to fool with light, especially light at the end of the day.  On the way back home from  the Gym I took a picture near the Post Office in Linda Vista. The bike rider and automobiles are waiting for a light at Linda Vista Road.  The car wash straight ahead is called Buggy Car Wash and the small billboard declares what it is.  Back home, a fire road on the hillside runs into the sun. I couldn't resist photographing the barbed wire and other discouraging signals to keep people from climbing the electrical towers on the hillside.  Flowering pear trees are very much alive, and on the hillside below our home are the stumps of trees that were cut down many years ago. I end today's collection of pictures with the bark of a eucalyptus tree outside our house.

There is no sense or reason...
to the pictures (or the writing) today.
I went out to the hillside late in the day
when the sun was setting and the light was fading
and I got pictures... and went home and put them together
on the computer... and decided against trying to make some 
sense of them.  I've taken a picture of the bougainvilla on a day
sometime last month... I thought the leaf is just about as much
autumn as things get in San Diego... a little withering
around the edges... flowers going off their color
a little but not so much that you
notice it's happening.
The temperature
at night
cool.

Melaleuca Trees

Pigeons…

mysterious creatures.

Someone dropped and shredded some kind of food material

that pigeons know and like

near an entrance/exit of Poncho Villa,

a Mexican market on El Cajon Boulevard.

The birds ignored people getting close

like one guy with a camera

who will remain nameless.

I was reminded later

that these pigeons are not very different

from people and other living things who

ignore risks, forget about them almost

completely, to get what they want.

An Adolescent Girl in Love

Nothing else on earth is as innately intelligent

and ignorant at the same time

as an adolescent girl in love,

an even fifty percent basic instinct

and the rest a muddy muddle of raw genius.

Her mother should be able to understand,

having been there once herself.

Her father has no hope of understanding.

He thinks something has changed in her walk.

Her voice has dropped a fraction of an octave.

Her direct gaze at every living creature

says she knows some new thing,

and he is afraid he knows what it is.

Daffodils two days after they open

show absolutely no signs of wilting.

I did my volunteer work at the museum today... before I went to the museum, I wandered around Balboa park and got photographs before going to see the Minor White exhibition at MOPA.  Wow!
I hadn't gone through the new show, and I was glad to see Minor Whites photographs and a good explanation of what he was trying to accomplish.  His focus was on photographs in a series, which he called sequences.  I have liked the photographers work for a long time, and probably have copied him without realizing I was doing it.  Today, My photographs are a sequence... half an hour before I went into the museum.

Jury Duty today…  I spent the morning and part of the afternoon at the County Courthouse  listening to a rough outline of a criminal case before being questioned along with about 30 other people and then being among those who were allowed to go home without becoming one of the twelve, or even the thirteenth alternate. I am proud to be an American.  We have a good system of laws.  The pictures don’t really have anything to do with the jury duty, but I like them.  I’ve used pictures on the Blog very much like these on other occasions. Somehow they seemed appropriate.  On the way back to the train station to catch the trolley for home, I checked out the commotion over at the harbor…  Didn’t learn anything, but I liked the sailor on deck.  The picture of William Templeton Johnson’s museum also makes me proud to be an American… and I would like the eucalyptus tree bark whatever my citizenship.

Julian Cider-making...
     We went up to Julian with Irene and Jim Fudge today... and the town was full of people.  We went out to the Fitz's mountain house with its pond, apple orchard, and cider making-machine... Great Fun.

When I was still doing the four-letter thing called work 

on April 11, 1992... on school business.

I was in New York, Upstate New York, in somebody else’s home.

I remember the occasion… where does time go?

I was looking for the poem I put on the Blog yesterday...

and found the short poem... I'm using today.

Chairs, books, etchings, come old pumpkin seeds

dried in a dish in the kitchen window;

pencils in a long narrow tray from India;

a crystal frog and five elephants,

one of those a seven-year’old’s art project

in some long ago second grade class;

family pictures of weddings and picnics’

deep red, small rugs on polished wood floors;

water colors, bright pillows and flowered drapes

in a real home of honest people in Rochester.

The superfluous April rain respects the quiet warm.