Baby Goat

Mabel was extremely pleased to encounter a baby goat right out in the open at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. In fact there were three of these long-eared, long-legged juvenile goats on the lawn, each attended by a teenage summer employee. Mabel had some doubts about just how to approach a goat, but Mamma showed the careful way to gently pat and pet. The goat stood still.

Mabel's books are full of animals, her head is full of animals and her speech is full of animals. Yet her Northern California city existence in the early 21st century decrees rare and few moments of contact with actual living animals. She encountered a herd of small-scale adult goats while visiting her East Coast grandmother last year. That remains a splendid memory. As far as I know, however, that was the only other time Mabel ever had a chance to pet one. She was fully  prepared to enjoy the opportunity and the goat was prepared to put up with it.

On the way to the Little Farm

Strapped into the car seat on the way to Tilden Park, Mabel kept herself entertained with her Calimari Puppet. After we parked there was a short walk through woods to reach the Little Farm, our Sunday morning destination.

Full of activity and full of Mabel, this is the 2500th post on Spencer Alley. It began five years ago with no inkling or expectation that Mabel would even exist. Then in 2010 (seemingly all in a rush, as above) fate sent her along, changing everything for everybody for the better. And I alone was formerly the fool who doubted the possibility of true historical progress.

Cows & Mabel

The Little Farm in Tilden Park on Sunday was the perfect place to go for a Father's Day treat, as Mabel's father agreed and Mabel agreed and I agreed.

At the moment when my daughter's phone was busy taking this picture, Mabel and I were talking about the long curling pale pink tongue of the white cow. And the flies. Mabel did not approve of the flies on the cows. We fed the cows celery stalks.

Below, Father's Day photos of Mabel with (from top to bottom) Mamma, Daddy, and Grandma.

Geoffrey Farmer

"The delicate yet abundant large-scale collage Leaves of Grass (2012) by Geoffrey Farmer is set up in the upstairs Loggia of the museum. Farmer arranged hundreds of shadow puppets, cut-outs from Life magazine, the most influential illustrated news magazine in the US, published from 1935-1985. He strings 5 decades of iconic faces, products and events together in a massive retrospective, detaching them from their former magazine context. The relevance the media once at least partially attributed to those pictures has vanished. Their dense layering makes them form a colourful body, which from afar looks like colourful grassland. And just like leafs the cut-outs gently move when beholders pass by."

Source here

Sticker Trouble

After we got back home from the playground on Friday and after Daddy got back from his travels, Mabel recruited him to play doll stickers. She has precise ideas about where and how the doll stickers should be arranged, but does not always have the dexterity to make her wishes come true. When things go wrong, Daddy fixes them.

Teeter Totter

Mabel had a new game to  play on the coiled-spring teeter-totter at the Chinatown playground on Friday. I would place our water bottle at the center of the teeter-totter. Then we would bounce. Then we would see which direction the water bottle traveled. It doesn't sound like much, but Mabel is interested in things like that.

Back To Chinatown

Mabel initially got interested in this webbing-sling-climber-swing-contraption when she was only barely able to walk. A companion of her own primeval past. Yet she keeps contriving new possibilities for it, as seen here Friday in the fenced-in toddler section of the Chinatown playground. Soon this part of the playground will probably seem too baby-ish to Mabel. Or maybe I only think this because her arms and legs have suddenly grown quite long.

The weather was bright but not particularly warm. We haven't had more than an isolated day or two of really warm weather since summer started.

Photos by Mabel

That is my backpack above, with Mabel's discarded purple hat sticking out the top of it. She took this picture herself on Friday afternoon when we revisited the gated playground in Chinatown that we have neglected for many months in favor of other playgrounds nearer to Mabel's place of residence. When it occurred to her to ask if she could take a picture, we figured out a way to rest my heavy camera on a railing. When it was stable and aimed in the right direction, Mabel could use her pointy finger to push the big silver shutter-button. Then we checked the small display screen and viewed what she had captured.

Mabel was far from satisfied with her first picture of the square-windowed office building. She wanted it to be less dark. I set a slower shutter speed and helped to hold the camera Very Steady. Then we got the second square-window picture and Mabel said yes, it was good.

Equally challenging was this squiggle-shaped cut-out on the climbing structure. We determined that it had no purpose or function other than "decoration" but we did not stand back far enough from it when we first tried to photograph it. All we got on the first try was a dark rectangle with a shadowy worm-blob along the bottom. We moved back and sat on a step and propped the camera on my knee. Then Mabel could make an image of a squiggle-shaped cut-out that really looked like a squiggle-shaped cut-out. She then had three pictures she liked and two pictures she didn't like. I got permission to use all five of them here, including the not-liked ones.

Above, an unpremeditated view of the red squiggle-shaped cut-out (caught by accident in background) as taken by me some while before it entered Mabel's head to start making photographs for herself.

House of Hackney

House of Hackney is a fresh London source for interesting fabric prints and wallpaper prints. This new company seems to occupy much the same niche in the present design-era that Laura Ashley occupied thirty years ago. House of Hackney's aesthetic is a little more ironic than Laura Ahsley's used to be, but essentially the two firms were set up to service the same customer – for comfortable nostalgia that still looks up-to-date. Photos are here.

Red Peony

I found this photo captioned "the peony whose beauty is partially obscured by bluebells" here. Then I used it  (with credit) on a recent morning as my contribution to Silas & Eppie, the daily game of random side-by-side image-matching that I play with my daughter. This enterprise preserves for us a trail of visual preferences leading all the way back to 2008. We began Silas & Eppie in September of that year, after I had set up this site in July. They are siblings, separated by only a few months. Consequently, both are on the verge of their five-year birthdays.

I personally think of the flowers in the foreground (above) as campanula because that is what they are called in the plant nurseries where I have seen them and bought them. Bluebells and campanula are the same, I discover. In the rural Middle West growing up I never encountered this plant at all, so the common name bluebells calls up an image that does not resemble this flower. It is instead some bluebell of my own imagining.