Part-time prevaricator
You tired of these? Because I’m not.
It was warm enough that I stayed outside of the car and watched the show. To the naked eye—to my naked eye, at least—the aurora weren’t as bright green as they appear in the photos; more like a dull paleness in the sky. But you could see motion and structure in them, which isn’t always the case.
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Nerdy details: All shot at 50mm, f/1.8, varying shutter speeds.
On the see-it-before-it’s-gone flank of the Kullbergs’ warehouse, corner of 18th Street and Pacific Avenue.
About midnight last night, after I got home from getting half an hour of chilly star trails (and charged up the batteries the cold killed), I checked the space-weather app on my phone. It told me I had a strong chance of seeing some aurora if I left like right now.
So I did, and between about 12:15 and 1 AM, I got almost 400 photos of northern lights.
And I made all 393 photos into a 30-second timelapse, too. (Every second of video represents a minute of real time.)
Nerdy details: each photo is a 5‑second exposure, 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600. The photos were edited for brightness/contrast; the frames in the video are all straight-out-of-camera.
Shot from our deck.
Warmer than it’s been, but still cold enough to kill two camera batteries inside the space of ½ an hour. I gave up on seeing any aurora and headed home to process what I got.
Update: As it turned out, I got some aurora after all.
About 170 photos, 5 seconds each (for a total of about 15 minutes of rotation), ISO 1600, 11mm, f/2.8.
This morning our old friend Hoss was in the yard. I snapped a couple quick photos of him before he hopped away.
I had a dream the other night. I was visiting a friend—I don’t recall who, but it might have been one of the Craigs I know—and, left alone in a room, I was looking over the friend’s bookcase.
I found on there a copy of The Elements of Style, colloquially known as “Strunk + White” after the authors. In the real world it’s a thin book, not much more imposing than a pamphlet; I’ve read novellas that are longer. But in the dream it was a trade paperback, probably 400 pages long, and I pulled it off the shelf. I used to have a copy, in the dream, and I thought maybe I’d lent it to this friend.
But if it was my copy, I hadn’t put my name in the front, which I usually do when I lend out a book. So I hesitated, contemplated taking it anyway, then decided not to risk it. I put it back on the shelf.
I don’t remember the rest of the dream.
When I searched the Internet for “Strunk and White”, I found this article from Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, in which she lays out one reason why she doesn’t much care for The Elements of Style. (TL;DR: it’s a style guide that everyone treats like it’s a grammar book. In other words, it’s a set of suggestions that people instead treat like laws.)
