Pretty picture: I will lift up my eyes to the hills

Oof.  Long day of teaching + grading papers, and my brain is fried.  Time for a pretty picture.

The picture is called Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, by the nineteenth-century painter Albert Bierstadt.  I’ve liked his work ever since I first saw a poster of it when I was in high school.  It captures that “wide open spaces” feeling that everyone associates with the American West.  The part of the west that I live in is anything but wide and open — crowded and laced with highways is more like it — but even so, this picture makes me pretty proud to be a California girl.

And don’t you just want to walk right into those clouds?  I love ’em.