The sun did not rise this morning.
That’s a steal of, or as I like to frame it, an homage to, a line from The List of Adrian Messenger. In that 1959 detective novel, the sun did not rise in London due to a “pea souper”: a thick, thick fog that blotted out the sun (and that hid a cunning murderer, as it turned out). Today, the sun did not rise in Texas due to a thunderstorm so broad, and with clouds so dark, that the sunrise never broke through.
I can’t claim that travel expands the mind, but I have observed that it expands the waistline and the photography portfolio.
As we headed south from Ottawa en route to Phoenix via Myrtle Beach, we passed through upstate New York. Just a few weeks ago they’d had a few feet of snow dumped on them, apparently to celebrate American Thanksgiving. It’s a local custom, I believe: as a Canadian, I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it. Now that snow was mostly gone.
But all the water in that snow had to go somewhere. Some of it sublimated, likely; some lay in the fields, clearly (but also muckily); some ran off into streams, creeks, sloughs, and ponds, certainly. I’m used to waterways being high in the spring: seeing them high-from-snow-melt in late December was a first.
The hardest thing(y) about this face was figuring out what to call its location. Being for leftovers, it’s not a takeout box. Being a box, it’s not a doggie bag. Quora to the rescue again: it’s a to-go box. I think I knew that. Sort of. Remembering the things I know is getting harder all the time.
Anyway, I present herein a to-go box. With heavily lidded eyes and a chiseled Roman nose.
This week seems to be all about lids and cycles. Who am I to fight fate?
Of course, it could also be about humour in marketing, or about making a personal connection to affect behaviour.
Wait a minute, you say. We can’t have a personal connection with a metal jar lid, can we? Well, all I know is that *this* jar lid got its wish, at least as far as I could grant it: I threw it in the glass/metal recycle bin. It’s up to someone else to finish the job. And that brings in one of my mother’s favourite quotes.
It is not your duty to finish the work,
but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.
– Pirkei Avot, 2:16
It’s true, you know? It’s connections, all the way down . . .
The screen in front of me is not quite the dreaded Windows blue screen of death, but it *is* the black screen of endless updates. In the middle of the screen a message huffily informs me that the downloaded updates are installing and I should sit down and shut up. Perhaps I paraphrase, but I can almost hear it sniffing, impatient with my impatience.
Be still
and know that I am updating.
Below this imperious message, a small arrow chases its own tail around and around in a circle, the hamsters being otherwise engaged, I guess. 
Continue reading
After a long dry spell, here’s the second face in as many weeks. This one seems more seasonal than the suitcase. I mean, is this not the face of a slightly cross-eyed reindeer?
Of course, given that it’s a Timmy’s cup it could just be Canadiana: a moose, perhaps? Either way, I may never look at a maple leaf, stylized or otherwise, in quite the same way again.
The #TellMe challenge started in 2019 as a social media game: challenging others to express something in an indirect way.
Tell me you’re from NYC
without (actually) telling me
you’re from NYC.
I don’t own a car and life is easy.
Tell me you’re from the midwest
without (literally) telling me
you’re from the midwest.
It started, I think, as a fun and creative challenge playing to exaggerated stereotypes and (mis)perceptions but, social media being social media, it soon degenerated into something a little snarkier. I bet you didn’t see that coming.
Winter in Canada has, perhaps, one redeeming feature: I don’t have to get up too early, or stay up too late, to see sunrises and sunsets. Driving from Edmonton to Calgary last week, we saw all the stages of a sunrise at an entirely reasonable hour.
It started by looking as if it was almost done.
Look at this cute guy, giving me the eye from across the room.
Go, Blue Jays!
