Pomegranate Flowers

I spent most of the day fighting sleep and trying to get work done. In the afternoon, which is always the worst for me anyway, I interspersed translating sentences with reading news articles from National Geographic online. I read about a planet in another solar system that has hot ice, and that's H2O ice too. That is bewildering. Also that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are colliding. There's nothing like astronomy to make a person feel tiny and strange, but at least it kept me more or less awake.

So maybe there are limits to what a great infusion of caffeine can do for my dissertation. I wouldn't've thought that I could drink a strongish latte in a coffeeshop and then fall asleep immediately after! But that's what I did.

Well, tomorrow is another day. As for today, the most interesting thing I saw was a pomegranate tree. I hadn't realized it was a pomegranate tree, but its brilliant red flowers caught my eye, first like trumpets and later like stars.


When I looked a little closer at them, and at one that had gotten almost to the fruit stage and fallen, I realized that it must be a pomegranate. Doesn't it look like one? This is the fallen infant fruit that I clumsily dissected with my thumbnail.


And a picturesque branch spilling down in front of a color-coordinated Chinese house-building, with the sun slowly going down in the background.