The Sun Goes Down, The Sun Goes UpBe warm, be safe, be sane.
Conversations With The ThermostatIt is a Holiday, and I am at home. It is normally around this time during these kinds of days that I realize that I am cold, and mutteringly go up the stairs to have a conversation with the thermostat.
"Thermostat," say I, "I am cold. I note that the heat is not to a usual level. What is the problem here?"
The thermostat is cheerful; it has a simple job, and does it well. It likes the tasks of instructing the furnace when to engage, when to stop, it sits at a small desk kept in neat order, and is pleased to spend the time there, keeping things going. The thermostat has a perfect understanding of the situation, and a bubbly reply: "well, sure it's cold in here! You're at work right now!"
This is where things get a little sticky; it is not that the thermostat is stupid, just that it's very focused, and quite happy to be set in ways it understands. I stand there uncomfortable for a moment, and the thermostat eventually emits a sad and sheepish:
"Oh."
And I feel a little badly about that. It's not the thermostat's fault, after all - I'm the one deviating from the plan here. The thermostat is doing its best, and I find no fault with the work. In the end, both the thermostat and I understand this, and reach an accord of respect, and it knows that it is not a reflection on itself even as I fiddle with the switches to breathe heat back into the radiators.
Somewhere in the basement, the serene Japanese gentleman of a furnace moves a hand with grace, and it is so.
DichotomiesThe other night was a festive one. There are things I used to do to mark the turning of one year into the next. When I was with someone, our habit was to build a meal in a cuisine neither of us knew. More recently, I've noted the penchant for walking a roadway until either it or the year ends. Sometimes to mark the turn there are visits to gatherings, sometimes with cocoa, sometimes with stronger things.
Five days away on horseback, my brother lives in a deep swell of people and place. In the particular bit of it where he sets his hat these days, there is also a fair amount of stiff drink to be had, and many places to get it. The other night he stepped wobbly through all of that, the edges of the new year blurring with bright lights in the darkness, insistent rhythms on speakers set to Loud in a fight with the undercurrent of shouted conversation, rooms filled with tumblers of glass held swaying. I have no complaint with any of this: he has a knack for being in good places at such events, for which I gently envy him from time to time.
Anyway: this is not what I did.
I was still recovering from some transient bug, but able to walk: I walked. I walked up the little ridge line of the far hill out of my neighborhood into another, and stood on the edge of it all, the river and the city spread out in lights. I sat down on a railroad tie to wait, if I would be able to see the fireworks, down there where the waters meet behind the tall buildings.
If any were set off there, I missed them.
This turned out to be okay. We live in a patchwork of little townships, here, each with their own notion of how to run themselves. I can attest that a very great many of them count fireworks as a part of properly doing so: when the minute and hour hands swing through the twelve, the reports of the mortars began, most of them distant, but all present in that place. The sky above the ridge line across the river (patches of it as far as miles away) lit up with garlands and spears of every and any color, small but bright and each shining through the smoke of the one before it.
So, then: let it be a happy new year.
Falling DownI am lucky: I have a friend with a boat. This summer past, I got to spend a bit of time on it, tooling around the waters here and taking in the country from that strange and level view. We got to see many things, and wonder at many others: hidden villages best visible by boat, the strange structures left abandoned that were place for other, larger boats now long gone, the odd calm of locking through between a monster of a pleasure barge and a guy in a kayak. There are wonders, if you look.
One of the more amusing episodes happened on one of the islands we made quick port on. There was a bit of sitting, a bit of exploration, a bit of juggling done with river stones (it turns out that river stones are quite good for this). At one point we were walking the shore line, and came up on a patch of mud made from silt. This is tricky stuff to walk on, oddly yielding and quite slick, and a moment after one bad step I had tumbled into a heap on the shore, landing with a wet grunt.
I was told it was impressive to see. There was, as I recall, some giggling. I was also told it was impressive how well I fell; there are tricks to falling down, the main one being to let it happen. Modulo landing on any pointy debris, folks more often get hurt when they flail wildly against gravity: bits of them strain and struggle, and come down to earth in awkward ways leading to injury. I was a greenling student of a martial art, long ago, an learning to fall well is a large part of that, letting the ground come up as gently as possible. I still know that part of it, at least.
It was cold this morning, but sunny, and I found myself in good spirits: I had thought it would be a good day for walking. I wrapped myself up, stepped out the door, and some ways down the block touched black ice and fell flat on my ass. It does not do to ignore signs: I took the bus.
I walked home in the gathering dark. That was pretty cold.
ToolingWhen I was much younger, I would tune the little radio I had to the local sports AM station and listen to the broadcasts of the hockey games, played in the little arena for a little market in the middle of terrible forces both West and East. I have ever since had great respect and esteem for listening to sporting events on the airwaves. In happier times more recent, when my life had a large TV and a proper pile of speakers, we would dial up the games on the television but leave over the speakers to the radio, the local voices better to tell us what it was we were seeing (and sometimes just a moment early - a confusing thing, but not a bad thing). I have radios all over the place, but none yet in the room with the little screen. I need to fix that.
The other way I sometimes like to listen to the games is by walking around. Put a radio in the ear, toss on a scarf, and start walking streets, keeping an ear turned outward for the hoots and moans that pour from the lighted windows. I will not be able to listen to any more games of the local favorites in this way, this season. This is somewhat unfortunate.
I am making stately progress in the basement; I am wandering through the landscape of joinery, stomping downstairs to practice making dovetails in the ends of good stout pieces of scrap oak. The saws sing through the wood, the chisels are sharp enough to part liquid. The bin fills slowly with sawdust. It says something to slide together two pieces of wood and have them stick and hold, firm in their commitment. It says something, too, that they do this in spite of the lack of accuracy that always seems to slip into the work, somehow.
I'm getting better at it. This is what the practice is for.
And It's The Note That StingsI have learned this much, living here: Spring is doled out in dollops (sometimes starting as early as now), little tastes of warm breezes and sunlight. It pays to be careful with these. As easy as it is to shuck coats and grab a Frisbee, it is worth noting that it is not quite as warm as it seems, and winter lurks ever near (sometimes as far along as May). This is no reason not to take in what one can, though. Today found many moments fueled by bright light outside on patios, lawns, hillsides. The hawk that haunts our workplace wheeled happy in the young wind. Faces were upturned and smiling.
Even as the sun fell early, the mild air lingered this evening, as it did the last. This is another excuse to sit long on the porch, musing at the gathering dim and waiting for the dough to finish rising, the oven to finish heating up the chunk of rock that sits in there, patient. I know, too, that there is something of a sting at the back of this gentle hand of weather. The last time the winds came howling through, one of my neighbors lost a chimney, a great mass of mortar and brick succumbing in a crash I remember but cannot describe. I have my own chimneys. We will have wind tonight. I should likely not worry. I have never been too smart about that sort of thing.
For now, though, the porch is a welcome place, swept by warm breeze, made gentle with tea. Overhead, planes take their careful cone of approach, strobing the thin clouds and sending spears forward.
RTI once had the fantastic luck to watch a man give a presentation about how to give a tremendous presentation. It was as you would expect, or possibly hope: the whole thing was delightfully, pointedly self aware. In five minutes, he told us in his thick Belgian accent, you will no longer notice my accent (and this was true). When you are speaking, he said, position yourself so that you are standing comfortable and balanced. In this way, he said, you will project an aura of confident competence, as I have been doing, which your audience will pick up on and respond to (as we had). He had many such tips and hints, tripped and stacked so as to create a presentation of themselves: it was artfully done. I learned a terrific amount. It was all a bit like taking a linguistics course about the language the course is taught in (also a recommended experience). I hope you get to see him one day.
One particularly salient point the gentleman brought up was that one of the reasons giving a presentation in front of a live audience is nerve-wracking thing is in part because it is a real-time exercise, and those are difficult. I can attest to this myself. Over the last two years, I have been very lucky (or something similar) to have the opportunity to regularly stand up in front of a crowd of folks sized somewhere from twenty to seventy (!) people and try to tell a story. These are in the main snarky folk, and want a good entertainment. I have learned much from the experience so far (more to learn, too!), and I can say with some hesitance and hope that I have done alright by them. They have been a good audience: challenging, fair, requiring me to deal with the unexpected, in real time, no net. It is a skill, to stand there and keep going (as well as when to stop!), something artisanal the knack of which comes only with scary, scary practice. I do not screw up to much, and when I do, they are patient with me. I thank them for it.
(I should point out that it's also tremendous fun!)
My brother, too, finds fun while dabbling in real time. He has a different medium: he spins songs together. There is a rigid timetable for this sort of thing: when one song is flowing from the speakers, the next must be carefully configured to match, both in tune and on time. He has only one song to do this in: the music must not stop. In his practice he has gotten better, and now can set the bar for himself with waiting until there are only a miserly sixty seconds left before he must spin up the next. He's getting quite good; the magic of modern technology allows me to follow along. The thing my brother fights has a term of art; when the songs slide together out of joint, or phase, or tenor, this is either a verb or an unarticulated noun: trainwreck. The other evening, one happened for the most prosaic of reasons, as he tripped over the line out and killed the feed. Such are the perils of real time.
Mr. Containment gave me some Chopin; it is angling careful through the rooms of the house, culturing the mad anarchy of the rain against the windows, filling corners with gentle distance.
Soft Crunch, Low StumbleIt has been pointed out to me that folks tend to live longer in warmer climates. There is some physiological science to back this up somewhat; there are difficulties to living in cold. The heart needs to work a little harder to warm the feet, the back gets a bit of stress from the handling of snow and self on slick walks. The tromp of a commute aches with both wind a beauty; the woos have been peeled back, the snow is soft, and the air tickles when I breathe too deep. I have socks and boots, and I am young yet, but the days end early and I am more attuned to feel them. I can feel them pulling.
Today upon return I battled the still air with the arsenal of the kitchen. I set the oven to make itself merry, an parked a sweet potato in there to sit. On the cutting board the knife lopped up white potato, turnip, onion, mushroom. Dressed in a bit of oil and salt all of these tumble into a roasting pan to take up station on the heat. I ate those in a bowl under a stiff sharp cheese, mopping up the remnants with a hunk of bread. I saved the sweet potato for after, skinned and gently pressed by the back of a fork, under a shake of nutmeg an a slowly spreading pat of butter. The kettle has kept me in good company this evening, the low warble a reminder that it is time to refill the cup, and maybe see about wandering outside to gather some sage and chase away the gremlins that keep tripping the automatic floodlight.
Winter is a good time for bunkering. The dim and the chill are an invitation to blankets and books, curls of steam in the mug, low lights and simple music, moments spent in no pursuit of anything in particular. In ways, this is not what I need right now. Regardless, it is what is, out there, while landscapes turned orange by the sodium lamps, small efforts to give cheer to the streets that empty when the sun falls. I could shake fists, climb into a canister to seek sunnier spots.
For now, though, I am still happy with the quiet, careful winter. For now, the repose is yet welcome.
Arise, ArtisansEarlier this evening, my brother phoned with harrowing news. We traded voices in low confidence, set about in quiet spaces. This was all thrown apart by the kitchen timer which perches on my refrigerator, waking up and shrieking at us. I apologized for that; I had to pull the pizza out of the oven. He laughed: "every time I call you you're making pizza!" As of late, this is nearly correct.
I've been practicing.
For a few years now, I've been having some trouble getting up in the mornings. It was pointed out to me that one useful way to pull oneself into the day is to set the radio to our classical music station here in town and let it spring to life at whatever doomed hour is appropriate. I have had mixed luck with this. It used to be that the radio station in question was well aware that this technique was in use with listeners, an offered programming to match that goal during those hours. These days, they seem to have backed off a bit. While I often get woken up to some usefully thumpy thing, some days bring less effective pieces. They've been somewhat fond of the Festival At Baghdad bit from Korsakov's Scheherazade, and while this does a tremendous job of waking me up, it also keeps me still in warm wonder for the entire thing, waiting for that long, long note.
Add to this that the venerable clock component of my clock radio is showing both age and weariness from the daily ham fisted morning battle with the snooze button, and seems to no longer be fully reliable in the thin light of the morning. Not to mention arbitrarily turning on the radio in the middle of the day, giving me the curious experience of coming home to a house just left by a mysterious interloper with reasonable taste and an occasional penchant for the traffic report.
A newer, better alarm clock bears investigation. In the meantime, I suppose I should see about prising open the old one and peering in to see if there's anything fixable in there. I do not necessarily expect success, but it should be fun. There seems to have been need for much tinkering, as of late.
Sleep well. But not too well.
You Just Want Back In Your HeadOne of the things about living in this place is this: the ceilings are tall. This is quite helpful in the summer, as the warmer air in any room tends not to be where I am. I have found that this arrangement of interior space is helpful in the winter, too: it has pleasingly dawned on me that it is more difficult to go stir crazy in these little wide open spaces. Occasionally, the space can trend toward the absurd, sitting in the living room in conversation with someone in a chair, and noting in a moment just how incongruous it all is to have such great free height above them. The absurdity is most pointed in the kitchen and the pantry, where casual observation would lead easily to the notion that the Victorians were all eight feet tall, or spent their days on two foot platform shoes. Probably high-heeled ones, no less.
Well, that isn't true, so far as I know. Besides, they had help.
I have seen this effect flipped sideways. Once a friend of mine made a project of filling his room with bed; I am not sure how he did it, but he ended up with a low frame and sprawling mattress, somewhat even bigger I think then the weirdly named California King (they have Victorians in California, I could be given to understand). He showed us a trick with this bed. He stood at the foot of it with his back to the sheets. "Watch this," he said, and cast himself backward, landing in a fluff, supine on the comforter. In his progress he appeared to shrink. The bed was that big.
If your lover is restless in the darkness, and moves feet and knees while traveling in their dreams to your discomfort (or if you yourself do such things): get a bigger bed.
No QuarterTravels this morning included a swing by the local library. We have a tremendous library, with a tremendous set of patrons: as usual, the only reason I couldn't find the thing I sought was that someone else already had borrowed it. Usually I get to the library on foot, but today I took the box with wheels on, as I had to then go on to other places. By far the strangest part of all of this was that I finally got to try the new-fangled parking meter system that is spreading through the streets: little numbered posts and a solar-powered box to feed with money so it can cough back a slip of paper to be put on the dashboard. I was amused by the option of using a credit card for fifty cents worth of time; I do not think I have ever put so little money on one of those in one go. The credit card in my pocket makes no music; the coins in my pocket jingle sweet.
One of the things about modern music in this part of the world is that it is almost invariably in four-four time. Try it; reach for the nearest radio or what have you, fiddle with it until music comes forth, and listen to the merry invariant march of four beats, stress on the first and likely the third. The is plenty of variety in tempo, and sometimes dynamic range (although less so, these days). Time with my walking stick has given me a possible insight as to why this is so (although who walks anywhere anymore?). My friends who dance upon the polished wooden floors of ballrooms would scoff: they play in other signatures with regular abandon.
One of the things about antique music from what became this part of the world is that the people who played it were a lot more flexible about this sort of thing. The rhythms of the music are often broken and hidden under melody, and they were as apt to tune their stereos (had they had them) to something with four thumps of the drum as they would to three, and even sometimes stranger things. My waltzing friends, I think, would still scoff: three-four time is waltzing cadence, after all, and they could manage a caper or two.
I think, with some of these songs, I would like to see them try it. And by that I mean: if they tried it, I would like to see it.
Hey, TeaThe kettle I have is in the main utterly and thoroughly unremarkable, one factory finished mass-produced gentle lump of stainless steel and black heat-resistant plastic, the sole moving part being the little lid that flips up with the aid of a trigger for the first finger. It has been a part of my kitchen for a while, and time has burnished it with scratches and bumps and dings. This may stand to distinguish it some, but I doubt in any meaningful way.
There are two useful quirks to the thing. The first is the whistle, embedded in that little flip-up lid. The whistle turns out to be a perfect place to hilt a little stick-type dial thermometer, which in turn makes it easy to brew tea and coffee at proper temperatures, if one has a mind to do such stuff. As a secondary benefit, having a thermometer thrust into the throat of the whistle in the kettle does an admirable job of quieting it - at full bore, the whistle keens bright and shrill enough to peel paint.
The second quirk is the whistle. I have discovered by accident that if I leave the kettle on low (which, upon my stove top, as still something of an aggressive stance) the steam inside builds with a steady, gentle curve. The kettle when ready produces not the shrill tone of high fire, but instead a dulcet warble. I do not leap from the blankets and hasten to the kitchen to kill the heat, but instead can be afforded a stately stretch and amble. As a secondary benefit, it usually takes long enough for this to happen after putting the kettle on that I have pushed the thought from the foreground, and the arrival of hot water becomes a pleasant surprise.
The English are claimed to make good kettles: simple ones, with sweet character. I'm looking into this.
They say that the temperature tonight can be counted on one hand, and as the evening has rolled on, they've been saying less and less of a hand is going to be required. Be warm.
Adventures In ForesightThe winter weather of the weekend past has put some lasting echoes into life; one notable one is that I seem to have passed through this years moment of adjustment, and my foolish skin has finally acceded to the drop in the thermometer. It is freezing outside in a technical sense, but after the air of the days past, this feels positively balmy. The snows this morning were welcome if only because it needs to be relatively warm for it to snow like that. There were other reasons they were not, of course: I was largely unaffected by all of that, but I know well that this is only in part because I was careful, more still that I was lucky.
I whomped together a large mass of dough; I had though to make an experiment of keeping dough in cold air to streamline the evening meal a bit. With the fresh dough, I rolled up some loaves, baked them off, and then fought the cold by eating them warm, slathered with butter and the deep richness of a ripened cheese. It was not quite right: the dough would much rather have been a flat bread, proudly shouldering sauce. The next day, I pulled the rest of it from the Cambro, coaxed it back to pliant life, made it flat, gave it that thin cowl of sauce and cheese, and sent it in to bake fast in the hot air. It puffed up all over the place: a tasty terrain, but for all the world wanting to be a tangy, crispy loaf.
One thing I will give the Victorians: it's greatly more fun to toss dough when the ceilings are higher. I must remember to mind the ceiling fan.
The stove sits cleaned and drying, moonlit white.
A Bit Like A ConversationThese fast few days have been given over and written down somewhat for, in my case, lack of light. By turns the clouds have been close, the afternoon air has been made thick with snow, and when the sun has made appearance the air has snapped with wind, chasing everyone around the corners of buildings and through doors. When this becomes too sapping and I leave to late to take the trek home in good light, I sometimes find myself on the bus.
Occasionally I see friendly faces there. Conversation is somewhat difficult, given the ever present rush hour press, and the air is thick with the battling conversations of others who hail from more thickly populated places where the social contract spells out a privacy in such situations that is different from the standards here. I used to live where they're from, so I know that respect for other's seclusion is such that their own is implied. I find it simple not to listen overmuch. Conversation is also tricky as it tends to come in little packets, the time it takes to get from here to there spread out over the spans of days and weeks, threads of topics lost in the whirl of life outside the commute, moving as it does. It is difficult to keep pace.
Outside, there is a rainbow around the moon. They tell me that this is a sign of snow, and so to does the Weather Service say so. All the weather service has for me, though, is data typeset and chunky maps betraying weather movement in blobs of green and blue. Outside on the porch, there is a rainbow around the moon.
In The WindThe chimneys quiver.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Mail accepted for the bears in the basement. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.