Part-time prevaricator
For the 30th day of April, and my 27th day of biking in April[1]I missed 3 days because a Colorado low dropped enough rain that I couldn’t get to the garage., I went for a 16km bike ride and managed to snap a couple photos while I was out.
Above: A classic car I spotted on a side street.
Below: The north wind was not fun to bike into, but at least it made the flags snap.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | I missed 3 days because a Colorado low dropped enough rain that I couldn’t get to the garage. |
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I guess it must be spring.
I wrote about 1,000 more words tonight in Dried Flowers, and here’s a snippet, a snatch of conversation about old-style bubble lights.
Her: Why did you dig out those damn lights?
Him: They were from her mom’s place. I thought… I thought it might be a nice connection for her. A link to, to the past.
Her: They’re fire hazards.
Him: No more than any other string of bulbs on the tree.
Her: They’re fifty years old. More.
Him: And? I’m fifty years old.
I also learned that bubble lights are still made today, and a lot of them use a chemical called methylene chloride because it’s got a low boiling point (39.6°C, low enough that a lightbulb can make it bubble). The downside is that a) it might be carcinogenic and b) your body will probably convert it to carbon monoxide if you ingest it. So, uh… don’t eat the bubble lights, I guess.
Today was the start of the blizzard ’round these parts. I took this photo of the lacy snow on my front picture window at about 1:20 PM, after I’d shoveled the walk for a second time.
The snow keeps coming, but not as bad here as other places; I’d be happy, though, if the wind would just die down a bit. I guess that’s what I get for living on the prairie.
Nerdy details: 50mm, f/2.8, 1/4000s, ISO 100.
There wasn’t any aurora visible, but I got 20 minutes worth of Earth’s rotation under a half moon.
The aurora data looked good and the sky was clear, so I packed up my camera—grabbing, at the last minute, my 50mm lens, thinking I’d maybe get some shots of Orion with it—and headed out to find a dark spot.
10 minutes northwest of town, I stopped on the side of a gravel road and got set up. There was a faint haze to the north which, to the camera, was green (my eye saw it as grey). The data showed that there should be a bit more activity in about a half hour, so I started snapping photos. Initially I was taking photos at 10 second exposures. As the night wore on I dropped that to 5 seconds, then 2.5 and finally 2. (I took a few frames at 1 second with my f/1.8 lens, but they were a little darker than I like.)
Here’s the results.
It was even visible in town, if you knew what you were looking at. This photo was taken on my street, just before I went back in the house.
Added: I took a few photos for a panorama to show how wide the show was. This stretches from the west to the east; the road visible on the far left and the far right is, in fact, the same road.
I had the day off today. I took a broken chair and ottoman to the dump, I did laundry, I talked to my mom and got texts from my sisters, I wrote a few hundred words, I went for a 2‑km bike ride (first of the year!), I enjoyed the heck out of a Guinness chocolate cake my wife got for me at Chez Angela, and I taught/studied a couple foot/leg throws at judo[1]sasae-tsurikomi-ashi (lifting/pulling foot block) and hiza-guruma (knee wheel) .
I’ve had worse birthdays.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | sasae-tsurikomi-ashi (lifting/pulling foot block) and hiza-guruma (knee wheel) |
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Way back in my University days[1]As a student; I’ve never really left the place., one of my friends had a fat paperback copy of a book titled Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted. It was a strange book, full of all kinds of psychobabble, and a list of dreams and their alleged meanings. We looked up a lot—a lot—of dreams. One sticks out in my mind to this day, mainly because of the hyper-weird specificity (or the hyper-specific weirdness) of it:
To see a horse in human flesh, descending on a hammock through the air, and as it nears your house is metamorphosed into a man, and he approaches your door and throws something at you which seems to be rubber but turns into great bees, denotes miscarriage of hopes and useless endeavors to regain lost valuables.
—Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted, by Gustavus Hindman Miller
And no, I didn’t remember that off the cuff[2]Though I’ve yet to forget, over the last thirty years, the phrase “a horse in human flesh”, and trust me, I’ve tried.. I just copied ‘n’ pasted it from the ever-helpful Project Gutenberg’s copy of Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted.
Turns out it’s in the public domain. Also turns out I’ll be making use of it in “Dried Flowers”[3]aka “Palimpsests”., which has more than a few dream sequences.
Here’s the first thing in my current WiP, “Dried Flowers”:
Dedicated to my dad, JJ, the way I want to remember him.
He introduced me to some of my favourite authors, mostly by forgetting to send back the “no I don’t want the Selection of the Month” card to the Science Fiction Book Club[1]This is how I first encountered, among others, Michael Swanwick and William Gibson..
And the final thing in “Dried Flowers” (don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler; just a post-text epigraph[2]Postgraph?):
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
—Jorge Luis Borges
…and now, back to writin’.
It’s been a while since I went out chasing aurora. Tonight the clouds stayed away, and the temperature, while chilly, didn’t feel like it was going to kill me. I got a couple shots of the aurora, faint and hugging the northern horizon…
…and also an hour or so’s worth of star trails, including what looks like an iridium flare. (It looks like my camera moved at some point early in the hour. I didn’t jostle it; maybe the wind shifted it slightly.)
