3rd Week of July 2008

Sin City
Dumpy, frumpy middle-aged vegetarian intellectual and cultural snob is required to spend three days in Las Vegas for a conference. Here is a moment of reckoning. So am I going to find beauty and poetry or am I going to be a pill/ waste all those hours and all that airplane exhaust and money?! (Tempting.) Okay. So it is a challenge.


Ahhh. The Bellagio fountains! All those marble floors. And surprise, surprise--flopping beside one of the 9 small beguiling pools turns out to be quiet and sane and completely relaxing. Or at the other extreme--because you just have to ogle at the strange architectural and social pastiche--we link arms and walk the Strip end to end. Eating fries. Drinking a frozen margarita while walking down the street being jostled by the crowd, nudged by young parents half-heartedly steering strollers.


Back in New Mexico: rain, delicious rain, humidity -- a strange foreign force, as if someone turned up the heat and the gravitational field. "Monsoon season" is what the locals say, with a slight smile.

Backyard news:
ohmygod the tomatoes are gorgeous. and i didn't get a photo of this, but I had a second ENORMOUS bug crash land in the grass. This one a three inch long creamy yellow and black number that I'm pretty sure is a cicada. (I am NOT trustworthy in this assertion--I seem to believe that everything might be a cicada.) I'm a bit mystified because it was gone when I got home. It looked like it was on its last legs at 8am--did something eat it? Did it rally? Fly off in search of a more dignified place to die? I honestly don't know.

Add Tomato photos.
something striping my petunia blossoms.
Bee!!