There weren’t any stars to be seen last night through the fog and the clouds, but I stopped on my way home from a friend’s wedding social in Onanole to catch some more earthbound light.
Foggy Road
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Jupiter at perigee
Jupiter is currently about as close as it gets to Earth. I went out tonight hoping to catch some aurora, but the show was pretty meh. So I aimed my 250mm lens at Jupiter instead, and caught it with its moons (left to right) Ganymede, Europa, Io, and Callisto.
Bike Ride — Sept. 25, 2022
I rode about 18.5km and snapped a couple photos down at the community gardens. A sunflower:
…and a grafittied bench.
Blackbirds in my yard
Blackbirds, blackbirds up in a tree
Traditional rhyme
Count them, count them, what do they see?
One for sorrow, two for joy
Three for a girl, four for a boy
Five for silver, six for gold
Seven for a secret that’s never been told
I’ve been leaving the fallen leaves where they lay in my yard. I’ve heard it’s good for the local ecology, given beneficial bugs and small rodents a place to winter outside.
The other day, a squadron of blackbirds came for a visit. Seems I may have left them some snacks. Circle of life, I suppose.
Update: I have been informed that these are probably grackles. Please update your poetry reading to suit.
Saturday night’s show
We went down to Boissevain on the weekend to help out with the Dunrea Flea Market[1]It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea., and stayed over at our friends’ farmhouse a few miles south of town. There were a few shows put on by the Northern Lights that night; I caught one of them. They danced for about 20 minutes while I watched. Here are some of the photos I got.
I tried to capture a panorama, to show just how much of the sky was involved. Unfortunately my image-stitching program balked at creating a panorama; the aurora were moving too much for the software to find similarities in the photos. I manually aligned them instead.
And I did up a quick timelapse. The 33 seconds of video represents about 33 minutes of photos, each one a 5‑second exposure.
When the show was winding down, I turned around and saw that the Milky Way was high above the farm. One more photo, I thought, then I’ll go inside.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea. |
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Friday night in the park
My friend Tim was camping at Wasagaming, as is his wont on the September long weekend. I went to visit on Friday evening.
We headed up to Spruces to check out the sunset…
…and the moon.
Later, the galaxy appeared as the moon set.
And I decided to try to catch Jupiter with my 55–250mm lens, which is usually too shaky at 250mm. It seems to have worked. (If I’m reading this right, the moons are, L‑R, Callisto, Europa, and Io.)
After I dropped Tim off at his campsite, I saw that the aurora were making an appearance. I stopped in a few places (the beach in Wasagaming[1]Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach, the dock on the golf course road, and on the roadside on #10 highway).
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach |
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Writing Retreat 2022: Wrap-up
How’d I do against my goals?
- write at least 10,000 words in “Dried Flowers”: Check. The novel went from 33,000 words to 45,000.
- get some astrophotography done. Check: see below.
- read some books. I read the last chapter in Fugitive Telemetry, the last 6 chapters in The Book of the New Sun, and made my way a bit over half-way through Catch-22. Also, I borrowed the next Sandman collection from one of the library’s online resources, and read a couple chapters in it.
- ride my bike. A little; one 6km ride and a few quick runs across the dam into town to go to the coffee shop, so as to use their wifi.
- go kayaking. I got out on the water on Thursday and Friday, for a total of about 8½km.
- relax. Yes? I had a hard time sleeping past 7 am, but otherwise it was a relaxing week.
All in all, this was a good retreat. As always, I wish it had been longer, but you know what they say: so it goes.
Writing Retreat 2022: Friday
In the morning I wrote my 1,000 words after breakfast, then read a few more chapters in Catch-22. Man, that book is convoluted; I think it’s a good re-read, especially considering that my current project is somewhat non-linear too.[1]It crossed my mind, as I was in the kayak, that Peace and Jacob’s Ladder will also have interesting things to say to me, as I write this tale. But I think I’ll wait till the first draft is done.
After lunch I went to the coffee shop to post yesterday’s missive, then—since the weather was, if anything, more lovely than yesterday—I took the kayak out onto the lake again. As I was returning, I checked my distance, and found I’d gone 4.31 km. I decided that another quick pass by the public beach/floating play structure and back should easily add another 0.69 km, and I was right—my final distance as I beached my craft was just over 5 km. I can live with that.
I read a bit more, had supper—the last of the burgers I barbecued, which leaves only 6.02×10²³ smokies, cool cool cool. And now I’m about to start writing, with a glass of iced coffee[2]Made from the dregs of my morning coffee, poured into a glass and stored in the fridge, where it developed a thin skin of ice. beside me.
The sky was cloudless after dark, so I packed my gear and headed north for a few kilometers. I found a nice dark spot on a side road just before the entry to the river valley, and shot some photos of the Milky Way again.
Sample
She walked toward the lake. Her sandals filled with sand, fine and soft as talc, annoying her. She took the sandals off and carried them, looping their straps over her middle and index fingers and crooking her hand into a loose fist at her side. The sandals’ heels thumped her thigh softly with every step, which was a different kind of annoying.
At the edge of the water the sand darkened, not because it was wet, she saw, but because words had snagged in it, lay flat on it: water-coloured sans-serif letters overlapping in senseless profusion. A million thes and as and saids in blue and aquamarine and smoke grey were scattered as far as she could see, and tens of thousands of words less common—less invisible as one of her editors had put it—were layered below and above, freshly deposited or soaking into the sand, darkening, disappearing: birth, house, joy, sparrow, rose, formidable. Soft wavelets made of bluish words capped with small white wordcaps dropped new words as she watched, the white foam of window whirl bribe fading, darkening, becoming part of the great smear of words.
She set her sandals down where the sand was still heartbreakingly bright, where the waves hadn’t come in and crested and crashed only to recede. Where the paper was still unblemished, the page still holy and blank. She walked into the water; no, the lake of words.
Water isn’t wet, she remembered someone telling her, after someone else had made the “water wet, fire hot, sky blue” joke at some TV report about a new discovery that was painfully obvious if you just applied common sense. Water makes other things wet, but wetness, he told her, jabbing a finger to make his point stick (and it must have worked, because here she was thinking about it) is not an intrinsic property of the water itself.
The words touched her and did not feel wet, did not wet her ankles or (as she progressed) her calves. They clung to her as water would, molding themselves against her shapes. She felt transom and forget and peace against the backs of her knees, in amid the whirling yeses and saids and thes. She walked further, deeper. Her skirt didn’t cling against her as it would in water, but the words crowded onto its dark fabric too. The tail of her blouse was decorated with now and together, dried and he.
She took a breath and ducked under the surface.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | It crossed my mind, as I was in the kayak, that Peace and Jacob’s Ladder will also have interesting things to say to me, as I write this tale. But I think I’ll wait till the first draft is done. |
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| ↑2 | Made from the dregs of my morning coffee, poured into a glass and stored in the fridge, where it developed a thin skin of ice. |
Writing Retreat 2022: Thursday
I got up earlier than I would have liked. The cabin got chilly overnight—the outside temperature dropped to somewhere around 8°C last night—and so I opened up the curtains anywhere the sun would shine in. Then I made coffee and had a banana, and sat down to process last night’s photos and charge up the camera batteries.
I wrote about 1,000 words in the morning and then read some more of my nice light beach read, Catch-22. (I’ve always mentally paired Catch-22 with Slaughterhouse-Five, since both are anti-war satires and both have titles of the form word dash number. There’s another way they’re linked, I’ve decided, because both of them unstick the reader in time. In Slaughterhouse-Five it’s explicit; one of the first lines is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. In Catch-22, it’s implicit; Yossarian’s story bounces around in the timeline, with flashbacks, reminiscences, and foreshadowing leaving the reader unsure just when in the story we might be. Are they flying 30 missions or 55? Has Snowden perished yet or is he still alive?)
I biked down across the dam to the coffee shop to post yesterday’s update (which I’m sure you’ve read) and mutter to myself about the 503 Service Unavailable error my site is still intermittently throwing. (I’ve got an open tech support ticket reaching back to, I dunno, July or so; apparently it’s a hard problem to solve[1]As the old joke goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors..)
Back at the cabin, I had a brief chat with my friend Ed, who was trimming the grass at his daughter’s cabin across the street. He invited me up the hill for a visit later.
I took the kayak out—finally, a day warm enough to go out on the water!—and paddled about 3½ km, up the lake and back again. If this isn’t nice, what is?
I had some supper—it’s becoming apparent I BBQed enough smokies on Monday for lunch that I’ll be eating smokies till the day after doomsday—and then sat down to write my evening’s 1,000 words, which ended up being a weird little acrostic snippet that’ll need a lot of editing. But as Sir Terry Pratchett said, The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. It’s not gonna make sense, yet, to most anyone else. That lesson is both necessary and a hard one to learn; I think I re-learn it every time I sit down to write.
After writing I went up to Karen and Ed’s cabin, high atop the hill, and we sat on their deck and chatted for about two hours. They say hi, everyone.
The skies were clear when I got back to my borrowed cabin, and I was sore tempted to load up my camera gear and go snap some more photos in the dark. But I was also still tired from the night before, so I compromised: I set up the camera on the deck and collected an hour’s worth of star trails right here. Even in a light-polluted spot like this—there’s a bright white lamp that shines down on the deck that’s easily as bright as the full moon—you can see the stars. You can tell—the photo’s up above.
Sample
She made her circuit again, in reverse this time: the small-windowed original building, with its museum pieces, the green chair from The Rt. Hon. Alan T. Kimpole, without whom perhaps there would be no library here, the dusty artifacts with their small, neatly-typed placards; then the First Annex, stodgy with dark wood (again, here, she found it difficult to not imagine the place smelling of brandy and the combined smoke of generations’ worth of cigars); the West Wing with its offices; the North Stacks with its prime ministers flanking the very dated portrait of the Queen; and finally the O’Neir room, surprising her not at all with its insistence on being last.
The last shall be first. Who said that? She should know. It used to be one of Nathan’s favourite quotes.
She hesitated before opening the door, her hand trembling a little. Please God, she thought, don’t let it be the funeral home. Because she’d come to suspect why there was a photo of their wedding next to the rosewood urn, and she didn’t like the implications.
#
There was a lake in the room now.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | As the old joke goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. |
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Writing Retreat 2022: Wednesday
Today, after breakfast, I sat down and wrote about 1,500 words (I really wanted to get the manuscript up over 39,000, and I just managed it). Then I read for a bit, and around lunch hopped into the car to go check out Big Valley.
Continue reading “Writing Retreat 2022: Wednesday”