Birds bearing gifts

Shiny things! (Via B.)

Also:

Rock-climbing cats (via Jane); unwarranted pouncing (ditto).

Fruit emporium

I have long coveted one of these square watermelons!

Back to normal

It's amazing having my real computer again - I went and picked it up a couple hours ago, and it feels like coming home! I live a good deal of my life via email and reading things on the internet: that little tablet was a good stopgap, but still.... In particular the Columbia webmail is hopeless, very happy to be using Thunderbird again.

New Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday, and I have just ordered a replacement watch (in the meantime I am wearing my other watch, a rather nice diving one - with a bezel! - that Wendy gave me after I got my scuba certification when she came to visit for Breakfast Near Tiffany's).

Saw an odd little play last night with G., Bull at 59E59. It is more of a scenario than a fully fledged play, and I thought only the sole female character had much depth - it's watchable but feels a bit purposeless. (I wasn't that keen on its predecessor Cock either.) Delicious dinner afterwards here - I had beef carpaccio (in my opinion this is the perfect dish - the combination of arugola, parmesan and raw beef is just ridiculously good), an amazing very simple branzino with lightly sauteed vegetables and a tiramisu I ordered after dimly recalling that we had eaten here once before and I had ordered what turned out to be the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. And it still is.

A most lovely present

I have been feeling physically rather low due to this cold - exercise deprivation is bad for the morale! - only it was a week with lots of good news concerning students and even my own fortunes (a work promotion that I will report here once it has cleared the necessary layers of bureaucracy), and now I have just received the best present EVER in the mail - a painting of my ideal bookshelf, a token of thanks from A. and O. for post-Sandy hospitality. This is amazing! I just laid it flat across the scanner to give you the impression, but it doesn't do justice to its lovely proportions. Click for a bigger bookshelf.

The ideal bookshelf

The data behind My Ideal Bookshelf. (Via BoingBoing.)

(Amy has commissioned one of these paintings for me as a present, and now I have to decide what books to select! I am leaning towards a subset of the style books, as I'd love to have a sort of visual representation of that project - Emma, Madame Bovary, The Golden Bowl, Proust vol. 1, The Line of Beauty, Barthes and Koestenbaum and St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, the Anthony Burgess 99 Novels - but it seems a little narrow, I may go more eclectically in the direction of lifetime reading of significance to me (Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, Pride and Prejudice, a book each by Diana Wynne Jones and Dick Francis, David Copperfield, Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Richard Holmes's The Pursuit, Clarissa!).

Amazing presents

It is funny, really I feel showered with good things - but I received two truly excellent presents in the last two days.

My father has sent me a Roku box...

And my mother has sent me Green's Dictionary of Slang!