This is not Buddy - it's a ruffed grouse, the state bird of Pennsylvania

Buddy just has a virus and should be fine. Some steroids and precautionary antibiotics, some subcutaneous fluids, some hifalutin food to eat for the next five days, and another checkup in three weeks -- no charge. Total bill, $183 and they also trimmed his nails.

Heart is good, lungs are good, blood glucose is good.

He was a perfect charmer in the exam room but is mighty happy to be home.

There are close to 60 objects in the Henri Rousseau: A Painter's Secrets exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, and images of every single one of them are behind the cut tag. You have been warned!

All images are click-to-embiggen. Many diacritical markings have been omitted (technical difficulties). I've noted the ownership of paintings in Philadelphia collections but not others. Perhaps I should go back and add the ownership. Maybe later...

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That's a lot of Rousseau to take in at once.

There is a very lovely, very shallow pool at the entrance to the Barnes Foundation

This exhibition of works from the Barnes Foundation permanent collection, presented in a new context while their galleries are being refurbished, closes August 31. A number of people in other social media spaces and in real life have expressed an interest in this exhibition, so I am making this entry public.

( Background on the Barnes Foundation and the way the works are usually displayedCollapse )

And now for the images. All image captions are transcriptions of the wall labels in the exhibition, not original work. I have made two remarks on my own, which are set off in brackets. Reminder: you can click to enlarge.

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As noted earlier: you can view these works, including their regular positions in Dr. Barnes's "ensembles", on the "collection" section of the Barnes Foundation website:  https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/

Gratuitous photo: I rehomed the hated lace-weight yarn yesterday and now my stash contains only remnants. Time to shop!

Leaving this post public for a bit.

A friend-of-friends user, sunshine_two, has subscribed to my journal and I have subscribed back. Looks like we can still see each others’ public posts but that’s it. Happy to change to friends on a trial basis, but I haven’t figured out how to get beyond the mutual subscription. Maybe on the desktop? Maybe it’s up to sunshine_two ?

For kazzy_cee, especially. Look who I ran into this afternoon!

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Petah Coyne, "Untitled (Two halves of the same soul)." Random visitor obligingly posed for scale.

As folks say in my neighborhood, I feel some kind of way about the sacrifice of 26 beautiful peacocks to make this installation, but it was definitely breathtaking. As was the rest of the exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' Landmark Building, Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America. I am so intrigued by it that I plan to drop small dollars on an individual membership for the year. It has the advantage of being less than a block from the new Trader Joes with the wider aisles, so I can have a two-fer: spend time in the museum and then go buy cheap eggs.

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Today is a day of minimal steps. I have clerical stuff to do all morning, a ZOOM meeting to attend this afternoon, and a quick run to the Triangles to pick up meds in between. Tomorrow looks wet, so it will be my baking-and-laundry day.


STATS: Morning weight: 150.4. Yesterday’s steps: 7,049, every one of them hard-won.

The daffodils of Madison Square are ready for spring

Several Facebook friends have noted that the Equinox begins at 5:24 p.m. today. In celebration, I've brought the winter mugs (snow scene at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park) upstairs for storage and brought out the spring mugs (red tulips from a Flower Show display some years ago) for use.

Yesterday was pretty ordinary: two loads of laundry, a quick walk to the Triangles to pick up an Amazon order (wrong kind of orchid food, oops, so I'll have to return it), and an afternoon spent chopping and stewing vegetables for a ratatouille-adjacent dinner that used up a pound of superannuated ground chicken that I exhumed from the freezer. I am playing catch-up on a number of Tolkien-related podcasts that I let slide while in the throes of Flower Show prep and attendance. Speaking of that: I have finally solved my little Google login problem on my iThingies, to my considerable embarrassment. What was wrong? The login screen requires scrolling down below the visible portion to click a blue "submit" button. Sheesh....now I'm good to go, two weeks too late to edit the tour-guide info sheets from the show floor but I'm glad I'm back... I note with even more embarrassment that I'm making a lot more mistakes with interfaces than I used to. Attention must be paid!

I'm "shopping" for some new LJ friends, as you may have noticed. One by one, the old LJ cohort has dropped by the wayside, many in protest of our Russian overlords' execrable human rights violations. Although that makes perfectly good sense to me, I have a lifetime membership so my presence isn't exactly lining their pockets, plus I like being able to archive a year's worth of journals as a pdf using Bookblogger. But I miss having a community. I recently read a piece by Cory Doctorow on the "enshittification" of several social media platforms and I am increasingly noticing this on Facebook. ( https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ )

halfmoon_mollie has suggested a couple friends-of-friends, and I've dutifully subscribed. I didn't see an "add friend" option. Maybe that option has gone away? In any case, I suspect that I will only see the public content and not anything restricted to friends. I assume the reverse is true for those who have subscribed to me in turn. That has me re-thinking my usual practice of friends-locking everything. Really, who cares what my daily weight and step counts are, other than me? So this one will stay public. It's a pretty fair sampling of my usual daily recap.

In celebration of the Equinox, I'm traveling up to the Temple University library this afternoon for a talk-and-walk on forgotten women of horticulture, beginning at the library with the talk and special collections show-and-tell and including a campus tour. It's Temple's Ambler campus, some miles to the northwest, that is actually the former women's horticultural college and the current arboretum, but I'm sure there are lovely things to be seen on the main campus as well. And the Ambler campus's archives and special collections were brought to the main campus after much of the Ambler library was destroyed by a freak tornado that also laid waste to a lot of the arboretum...


STATS: Morning weight: 149.8. Yesterday's steps: 8,439. Workouts: Marching With Meredith (15 min senior aerobics), twice.

Three suns over Mortimer's Cross, from BL Harleian Ms 7353:



You'll probably find the whole ms interesting. It's almost all pictorial: five paired images, showing a biblical story on the left and a relevant scene from E4's life on the right, finishing up with an epic riff on the Tree of Jesse.

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_7353

I scheduled a trip from Philly to London specifically to see this ms, with multiple anxious emails to guarantee me a reader's card and a seat. When I got there, a rather bored fellow said that oh, no, it was out for conservation. It would have been a waste of a couple thousand dollars except no trip to the British Library is completely wasted, and we also went to Fotheringhay, where I read one of the lessons in the church's annual service of lessons and carols.

"This is for pondhopper" -- I mentioned that the local parish priest, a former engineer from Chile, created an epic Nativity.

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I have it on good authority that birthday cake has no calories or carbs when it’s your own.