One of the unfortunate side-effects of the drought this fall has been the difficulty of taking good pictures of the wildlife. It’s worse for the wildlife – at least I have food and water – but there aren’t the normal plethora of fall flowers and butterflies.
The featured image shows a neat spider.
It’s been an insane year, spring flooding, followed by extreme heat and now dry.
Normally by now we’d have seen things like these:
I hope it’s better soon.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 – 1950
Once from a big, big building,
When I was small, small,
The queer folk in the windows
Would smile at me and call.
And in the hard wee gardens
Such pleasant men would hoe:
“Sir, may we touch the little girl’s hair!”—
It was so red, you know.
They cut me coloured asters
With shears so sharp and neat,
They brought me grapes and plums and pears
And pretty cakes to eat.
And out of all the windows,
No matter where we went,
The merriest eyes would follow me
And make me compliment.
There were a thousand windows,
All latticed up and down.
And up to all the windows,
When we went back to town,
The queer folk put their faces,
As gentle as could be;
“Come again, little girl!” they called, and I
Called back, “You come see me!”
The madhouse of university instruction has started again. Idiot administrators, daft students, and struggling faculty. I’m counting the days.
George Santayana
There may be chaos still around the world,
This little world that in my thinking lies;
For mine own bosom is the paradise
Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,
Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,
Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.
I heed them not; or if the subtle night
Haunt me with deities I never saw,
I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw
To hide their myriad faces from my sight.
They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe
A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.
Chaos means something more specific to the mathematically inclined. This little picture shows the pattern of convergence for the complex roots of (X^3-1) with Newton’s method. The colour shows which root was found for each starting point. There’s nothing that vaguely resembles a continuous boundary between regions. (The picture’s left-handed – the Red is X = 1.)
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1869 – 1935
Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade—as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.
This isn’t a long hike, sort of a rest day. We needed a small number of supplies from the local Co-op, it is rainy, windy and cold. A welcome change from Atlanta where it is dry, hot (95F, 34C), and smelling of car exhaust.
There is a steam train, so we do get the occasional wiff of coal smoke. That’s a welcome change.
The local websites give the times for the Snowdon train, but we’ll do that trip under our own power. There’s a 35L ticket that lets you use this train and the busses all day.
We hiked first uphill and across the face of old slate workings. Originally I planned to go for a longer bit of the trail, but the soil is completely waterlogged. It is a normal Welsh summer.
The tracks, sans train, run uphill from the house we hired.
Blaenau Ffestiniog from the hill. Our feet were still dry at this moment.
The clouds cover the mountains in this weather. Serious wet-weather gear is a necessity in these mountains. This is a place where you can get in trouble quickly, and not for speaking English in the Y Tap (a Welsh language pub that’s only a kilometer away).
Welsh flags are everywhere. They did well in the EU cup, not so well in the Brexit vote.
Another quick post, documenting yet another walk. This was only 5.77 km (3.5 miles) with a good 2000 feet of climbing. So it’s a decent prep hike.
Uley Castle itself is an Iron age fort. It is impressively fortified with steep hills and multiple terraces.
It has views that cover the Severn valley, which is good if you’re watching for marauding armies.
The hike walks over the hill in the foreground. At this time of year the Cotswold hills are covered in wild-flowers. Unfortunately, it’s also nettle season so one stretch of narrow bridle path was … interesting.
It’s a great place for dogs, as long as you’re careful about livestock. When we visited there were cows grazing in the central area.
This wide central area was covered in Iron Age dwellings.
Louise Bogan, 1897 – 1970
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.
Stephen Crane, 1871 – 1900
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Florence Ripley Mastin
Night fell one year ago, like this.
He had been writing steadily.
Among these dusky walls of books,
How bright he looked, intense as flame!
Suddenly he paused,
The firelight in his hair,
And said, “The time has come to go.”
I took his hand;
We watched the logs burn out;
The apple boughs fingered the window;
Down the cool, spring night
A slim, white moon leaned to the hill.
To-night the trees are budded white,
And the same pale moon slips through the dusk.
O little buds, tap-tapping on the pane,
O white moon,
I wonder if he sleeps in woods
Where there are leaves?
Or if he lies in some black trench,
His hands, his kind hands, kindling flame that kills?
Or if, or if …
He is here now, to bid me last good-night?
This poem was written during the American involvement in WW1.(1918).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806 – 1861
“O Dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!”
And still the generations of the birds
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds
Serenely live while we are keeping strife
With Heaven’s true purpose in us, as a knife
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds
Unslackened the dry land: savannah-swards
Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees,
To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass
In their old glory. O thou God of old!
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these;—
But so much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by contented through the heat and cold.
R. Harrison, Creative Enterprises 