Latest random photos

Double rainbow where we live! And

self-portrait as a cat. Last Sunday Tallulah and I went to "Afternoon on the Green," a UVI event that I perceived as an unwanted work experience, and she perceived as an opportunity for epic fun involving meat, a bouncy castle, and face painting. I belatedly realized that I need to look at things more from her perspective. 

Spring Break Sail to Culebra

Getting ready for Adam's cousin Kate's wedding. My photo choices have become increasingly random--I have no photos of the actual wedding.

Another case in point: gratuitous cat in a box

Tallulah and Olivia--I bought them ice cream after school and they approached it like a new art form, then had races across the deck of the library. It was good to be back--felt sorta like home would feel. I have to guess at that feeling, but there's nothing wrong with that. Then we had to go. No llores, Olivia sang out the window of the car as they drove away. And we went back to Callisto.

Rough weather so we broke up the trip back with a stop in Culebrita, where we hiked to the lighthouse.

Callisto swaying in the swell out there.

And I'm looking across at St. Thomas, on the other side of those whitecaps, fading out in a light mist. Is that home?

Inside the falling-apart, structurally unsound lighthouse itself.

Tallulah and the rescued mannequin

My new job is so consuming, sometimes just trying to get people to care (I find myself assigning students to get high and create art and then bring it to class for extra credit) that I've had little to none of the brain space I used to enjoy for doing my own unscripted thing. When I'm not performing the sleek authority figure or outré hip professor I'm writing (again) my novel--and the sentences flow so differently, so satisfyingly, and so slowly that I can tell my subconscious is locked in the arms of this creature of my making and remaking.

Now miraculously not asleep before 9:30, I'm thinking aloud about what the blog might become. Land-based for an unspecified period, I don't have the evolving stream of stimuli, everything ready for a new (to me) theory. Or just a photo that crystallizes, for us as much as anybody, that life is good.

But the other day, walking, I came across an odd structure, an abandoned open-air bar/dance hall, empty beer bottles in the corners, vines growing up through the cracks in the tile, like I sometimes stumbled across beachfront in the Dominican Republic, and realized that I still have a passion for cast-off things, failures, places where rejection and reinvention cross paths. 

I don't have any ideas for how to frame this, or explore it, just the intention to keep my eye out for what happens to people's used crap and the relationships that adhere to it. (The only thrift store on the island benefits the Humane Society--like thrift stores everywhere, it draws immigrants, here Haitians and Dominicans counting up their purchases in French and Spanish, trying to bargain, not trusting the cashiers, harried white volunteers speaking in their stateside accents who care so much about the luxury of pets. One calls out "Gracias" to a crowd of Haitian women after a belabored transaction, provoking an eruption of laughter. I find a hat from Madagascar, a child-sized pink Hawaiian muu-muu; Tallulah delights in the languid cats who roam the place, wallowing in the simple fact of being alive.) 

Antipodal Christmas family

Tallulah on Uncle Shawn

Jump series

An antipodal Christmas

Christmas here on the other side of the world is rather spectacular, including hedgehogs and talking pigs. But what I really need to write about is the "Maori and Colonial Museum." Let me grok that some more before I go public.