Breakfast.... and Home

Yesterday, Thursday, was the last day of our Santa Barbara jaunt. After packing our bags and checking out, we headed north and up the San Marcos Pass to join the very beautiful, very narrow, steeply winding road...

...that leads to the delightful aerie...

... where Seyburn Zorthian and her husband, Mark, roost. Seyburn, attentive readers might remember, is the artist whose friendly encouragements were instrumental to bringing me to Santa Barbara, and in particular to the Contemporary Arts Forum. Here's one of her paintings, nicely installed in the living room of their home...

As you can tell, she works in the area of color abstraction that seems to have been our major focus in the past few days. She prepared a marvelous breakfast for us...

... along with a fellow artist, her neighbor, and a friend of his visiting from Amsterdam--convivial company and an excellent scramble of (again!) fresh-laid eggs, a treat for city slickers like ourselves. We have been greeted with this kind of generous hospitality everywhere in Santa Barbara, and it was with some reluctance that, after breakfast, we wound our way back down the mountainside and headed for home.

Once back in the office, I made the dreadful mistake of getting right back to work, with the kind of results I could have anticipated: inattention, irritation, mistakes... and a frustrating sense of incompetence. I should have left well enough alone, put my feet up, taken a nice nap. But no. I was impelled by what I saw to be the need to immediately catch up. And this morning, notice, I'm still splitting infinitives. Or maybe you don't care.