Signs of spring

The birds are chasing each other around, loudly squabbling over the best saguaro nesting holes.

The ocotillo just down the side-street by the bus stop is flying orange-red pennons from every stem.

I noticed flowers on the white orchid tree and the bottle-brush tree today, but nothing like last year's displays. The orchid-tree blooms were small, crumpled-looking, and mostly out of reach; last year the tree was bowed down with the weight of blossoms twice the size. Maybe it's just that it hasn't really got going yet, but I can't help thinking that maybe last spring's extravagant glory was a special case, not to be repeated in a drought year even on the well-watered campus.

There are little orange and red mallows, and one solitary California poppy in the cactus garden, and some dainty colourful little things I can't put a name to.

Memory's a funny thing

In the last week, I have been reminded of two things I had completely forgotten about; magnetic paper dolls, and the late British TV sitcom, 'Birds of a Feather'. In the first case, the memory was dragged to the surface by coming across something similar in an airport giftshop, and in the second by hearing on NPR the incongruously melancholy song the show used as its title theme. Once I knew the memory was there, I could get more details by concentrating. I think my sister and I had a couple of the dolls, and one of them was a blonde called Linda. I remember paper cutouts of flower-baskets with fragile handles maybe a tenth of an inch wide, and hats that slotted over the cardboard head, and a portfolio that imitated a bedroom with stripy wallpaper, and the way the clothes tended to pivot around the magnet and swing into unlikely positions, and the greasy spot on the printed front of the doll where the magnet was. None of this is the slightest bit of use to me, other than as a pleasant recollection of childhood. The show, which was considerably more recent, seems to come with fewer retrievable details; flashes of the title sequence; glimpses of the actors. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about it, but I think I probably watched it when it was on for a couple of seasons.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things from the first half of my adult life that seem simply to have been overwritten by more recent or important stuff; adjusting to a whole different culture and language (even though the UK--USA transition isn't all that drastic compared to what some people cope with) will do that. I was slightly dismayed, a few years ago, to realize that my mental map of the area of Birmingham where I lived for nearly four years, ten years earlier, was almost completely gone. Also gone is much of the stuff I spent my teens memorizing, like the ten pages or so of Ovid for the Latin 'O'-level. I can chant a few declensions and conjugations, still, mostly because I was using them as nerve-calming mantras for years after I stopped studying Latin.

Oh, and I have a new personal-best time for an Easy level websudoku: 5 min 10 secs. (Average is still about 13 minutes, but creeping down.)