Home again, home again

When I was younger and wild to get out and about, any trip anywhere was welcome, but I was always too poor to do any real traveling. Now that I can afford it, I have become so cranky about the hassles of airports that I would do anything to avoid them. It's cheap shots like that which make me hate irony.

My trip to Washington last week, fer instance. I had great connections, short lines, interesting things to read on the plane, pharmaceuticals at hand, I paid extra for more leg room so the seats were the best I could hope for and yet I still spent the nine hours in transit pouting that I was not home with the cat.

Once there, things were fine. The training itself was no worse than things like this usually are, and better than some I've been dragged too. I got to catch up with my colleagues (hello to Jane in Honolulu) many of whom are witty and fun and we got to gossip viciously about those who aren't. Just like junior high! Yay!

Wednesday evening I got to nip over to Dupont Circle and the Phillips Collection for an orgy of modern art - Kline, Rothko, the usual gang. More cheap irony: the two special exhibits were both California artists. Richard Diebenkorn, whose big linear abstracts I love, had a show about his time in New Mexico, before he moved to Santa Monica and created the pieces I like so much. The ones in this show were interesting in that they were earlier evolutions of his style with the colors already in place, but the forms more mushy and less interesting than the Ocean Park series.



The other show was Brett Weston, a photographer whose work I'd only seen in group shows before. A gallery full of his best stuff is just dazzling. He printed in beautiful saturated blacks and silvery grays that transform his very naturalistic shots almost into abstracts. Lovely.



And then I got back on the plane and came home to my sweet, sweet boyfriend and vicious little cat and San Francisco.

Yay.