Via livredor, from redbird

Look around you right now and name 3 things you can see in the room you're in that make you smile/happy, even if it is just the tiniest little bit!

1. My two prints of Michael Parkes paintings
One is a girl standing on a pillar, blowing bubbles, and one of the the gargoyles perched next to her has leapt off in an attempt to catch a bubble, his shape of cracked marble reforming into more fluid, yet still stony, lines. The other is a blindfolded jester playing a violin, while a swan, gliding down the canal before him, dangles a bell from his beak. The former is shades of blue, the latter themes of burgundy, and strangely they match the portions of the room which they inhabit, with my blue armchair and burgundy-and-gold couch sitting beneath them respectively. wolfemancs said that he'd rather swap them so that he didn't come in late one night and think that the jester was planning to attack him with the bow held delicately in his pale-fingered grasp. Actually, I paraphrase and interpret; Craig didn't use those precise words. A frog is perched on the frog of the violin. The store in L.A. whence come my corset and skirt, Ourobouros, has Michael Parkes prints hanging in the changing rooms; I knew it was a good store when I saw those. I had first encountered his paintings years ago, at a gallery in Cambria that's next door to Linn's Main Bin, when I was there once with Claire. Goodness, I must have only been about thirteen or so.

2. The glass-fronted book case
We found it on Craigslist, and it holds my collection of really old books, as well as some more recent ones, such as my Nick Bantock; my music (ranging from Le Nozze di Figaro to Gilbert and Sullivan to Tom Lehrer) inhabits the lowest shelf, and the few games that I own live on another. I suppose it is really the books that make me smile, such treasures as a lovely edition of Last Days of Pompeii, and my grandfather's yearbook from Berkeley, 1922.

3. The furniture
My living room has really lovely furniture, a mixture of chance finds on Craigslist and family possessions. The black chair that looks so strange upon first encountering it, but which is in fact very comfortable, and which we've had longer than my parents have had me; the writing desk, which has been around for that much time as well. My father fought letting me have them, wanting to keep them at home and use them; but he eventually conceded that there really wasn't room for them, which is why they'd been in the garage for the last thirteen years. The writing desk has two little cubbyholes (pots, really) on the top, and I remember that they used to hold random keys and rubber bands and paper clips and pennies, only a few of any. Right now, the long well between the two cubbies holds the sea shells which I gathered in Long Island. The marble-topped chest of drawers belonged to my father's mother, as did the other one, which is in my bedroom. And the tall-backed chair with clawed feet, which lived in Cambria for years, and is now here; I now have material to cover its barren seat, purchased at Fired Earth in Oxford. Deep red chenille, with green-gold gryphons. The couch and blue armchair, both mentioned previously, were bought off Craigslist, and the long teak coffeetable was $20 from the same man who sold us the couch; it's missing some struts, but it's fairly sturdy. And the two wicker-bottomed chairs, one of which I'm currently employing, as I sit at the writing desk, and the other of which is holding a pile of shoeboxes and sits next to the chest of drawers, by the door, were also my paternal grandmother's, together with the four that live in the kitchen.

Tonight, tonight.

This evening and the last were spent in the company of leech at the West Coast A Capella Showcase. Much fun. This afternoon was not so fun; we had an almost entirely pointless rehearsal, which would have been tolerable, but after that we girls went shopping for blouses to wear when P5 has concerts, and this search was entirely fruitless. (I initially typed here, "this fruit was entirely searchless." I think I probably should sleep.) I had to practically bribe Kristen to drive me back to Berkeley, as we were shopping in Emeryville; but I had to get to the Classics library before it closed. Sometimes I think that American undergraduates don't understand about graduate work — yes, they have to study, and they might have to do research, but I think they don't usually have to do the running-back-and-forth-between-random-books-that-there's-no-way-you-could-own sort of research, and they certainly don't have to deal with the silly borrowing policies of graduate libraries. They were all, "we have to study too," and I was like, "yes, I know, but if I don't get to the library significantly before 5pm, when it closes, I won't be able to do any work for the rest of the weekend." But I got there by 4pm, in the end, just as the skies were beginning to crack open, so that when I biked home at 5pm, my velour trousers soaked up water like the thirstiest of sponges. On the bright side, I did get some stuff that I needed photocopied, and I discovered that my professor has the other half of the things I need in his office, despite their theoretically not being checked out from the library. So I can't get those until Monday anyway. I'm gradually wrestling Unicode Greek into submission, and I'm making headway on my transcript, and I finally found another reference to Φλαυιοϲ Νειλοϲ, that tricky bastard.

The UCSB Naked Voices were really good, tonight; you Santa Barbara people should make a point to go hear them. OTR did not, however, live up to its prior glory, and on the whole, last night's groups were better, except for the Harmonics; sadly, Noteworthy had shaky spots tonight, but most of their stuff held together well. I love the songs they did, especially the first and third (I don't know any of the titles, except for "The Rain," which they didn't do).

I'm all allergy-sniffly. Yuck. I'm also tired, and I'm going to go to sleep, and then go have brunch (after waking up) with leech and grimhild and filosophy101 at IHOP tomorrow. Haven't been there for ages, it should be amusing. The food's reasonably decent, despite it being a monstrous world-eating corporation, like most American food establishments.

Huh.

There's a random space of about three minutes silence on this last track of OTR's CD. Very confusing. It's fine in my computer CD player, of course, as I can just slide the bar to the right until it hits the new music. But it'll be annoying when I start playing things again in a real CD player, 'cause I'll have to actually get up and go wherever the player is. Very strange, in any case.