Out of car parts, a raven made a nest inside my skin

My brother's coming over tonight. Despite the fact that he lives in West Hartford, i.e., forty-five minutes away, our combined schedules ensure that we don't see each other as often as we might like. He's an engineer. He's on an eternal quest to make his 1991 Pontiac Bonneville into a sexy and barely street-legal piece of machinery, rather than an fender-dented steel boat with a stuffed Cthulhu in a Hawaiian shirt perched up behind its rear windshield. He had a ponytail and a mustache from mid-high school up until this summer, when he did away with both in the same week and promptly looked like the less consumptive and more romantic kind of Romantic poet. He also looks more like our grandmother than anyone else in the family, and he has her talent for visual art: he does spray-paintings of women who look like proto-Kandinskys or God knows what, black-eyed with blue pupils, intersected with arcs of red and yellow hazes as though they're only passing through this spectrum's field of vision. He wears a lot of black. We listen to some of the same music. I'm very fond of him.

Something that will stand the test of time

I finally got from my brother the photographs that I took at the American Museum of Natural History when we were there in January. Not all of them came out, but here's a selection. Almost none of them contain members of my family; mostly they're the dioramas that I love and always wish I'd photographed every time I visit. Think of it as a walk-through museum. Only with much less information, because while I may have taken the photographs, I completely forgot to take notes.

Some pictures from Yale's Winter Ball are also appended. Thanks to Roman Sazonov and Jeff Mankoff for the photos. I'm hoping for more in a few days.

And I'm using a mouse for the first time in months, because the touchpad on my laptop has died. Nicht so gut. All my computers have died in the spring. They're like the Snegurochkas of Macintosh: only they don't come back in the winter.

(Cut for extensive photography.)
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