
I may not be ready but I guess it’s here. At least it’s pretty.
Part-time prevaricator
Taken from my back yard.
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.
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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How’d I do against my goals?
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.
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.
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. |
About 20km from my house, it’s dark enough for photos like these.
Nerdy details: all photos were shot at 11mm, f/2.8, 30 seconds, 3200 ISO. The landscape-oriented image is a panorama stitched from 12 photos (which explains the gravity-defying hydro lines).
Compare and contrast: Last month.
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.
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.