Astronomy Tuesday

This amazing image was one of the winners in the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year for 2025. It was taken during the lunar occultation (when the moon passes in front of another celestial object) of Saturn in August.

Image credit: “Saturnrise” © Tom Williams (UK)

Saturday reflections

The porthole on a washer in our laundry room makes a fun frame.

That brand-new white comforter I was congratulating myself for buying just a few days ago? Well, it had an unfortunate encounter with a chocolate protein shake and I spent much of Wednesday schlepping up and down the five flights of stairs between my apartment and this washing machine, when I really should have been doing class prep.

Those stairs are not getting easier with age, arthritis, and injury, but one thing I have acquired is the ability to laugh things off and then just deal with them—that stupid accident would have had me pissed off at myself for days in my youth. (I was much less sanguine about having no internet all day Thursday and having to install the new modem and router that had been sitting in boxes on my living room carpet waiting for a convenient time. I hope my mother was covering her ears up in heaven because there were several hours of loud, nonstop cursing.)

Urban poetry

Bryant Park becomes a Christmas market during the holidays, and picking my way through the crowds on on the adjacent sidewalk on my way home tonight was annoying. It was so cold and these people are so slow!

But this line of pedicabs waiting for fares cheered me up, though my admittedly Scroogey self would have probably gone for the one not dressed as Santa Claus. Just because.

I did actually take a pedicab once, many years ago. I'd been to a corporate Christmas party, and it had started to snow. I wasn't dressed for the weather, and there wasn't a cab to be found (pre-Uber days) and so when the guy on the bicycle offered to take me home for what a cab would have cost, I climbed aboard. And it was strange, but fun, and I will probably never do it again.

Another day in this endlessly fascinating and amusing city

I saw this sign on West 24th Street on my way back from the dermatologist yesterday.

I was tempted to take a peek but I did not disturb the birds.

Astronomy Tuesday

It's been a long time. I do occasionally see images from the Webb telescope and think, Oh I should post that. And I don't.

But I especially love this Webb look at Sagittarius B2. This molecular cloud near the core of the Milky Way is one of the largest in the galaxy. This image was taken in near-infrared, which doesn't capture all of the clouds of dust and gas but is better for seeing the stars. And such stars!

Image credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Adam Ginsburg (University of Florida), Nazar Budaiev (University of Florida), Taehwa Yoo (University of Florida); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Sunday bird blogging

Another look at the irritated crow in Glacier National Park this past summer.

It's been quite cold, and it's lovely to be able to snuggle inside all day if I want to. I usually use a weighted blanket in the fall and winter; I don't know that it really helps me sleep better but I do love the sensation of lying under a pile of warmth in a chilly room. But after I hurt my knee, it was hard to turn over in bed, and impossible under all that weight. I sleep with the window open a few inches (in New York apartments with steam heat, the thermostat is the window) but sometimes it goes from pleasantly chilly to downright freezing over the course of the night. I'm hot. Then I'm cold. And I missed my weighted blanket.

All of this is to say that after weeks of being annoyed about this, it finally occurred to me that I could just buy another comforter. Not weighted, just a regular comforter. Now I'm warm when I need to be, and I can turn over no matter how grumpy my knee is feeling, and I feel like an idiot for not having thought of this sooner.

Saturday reflections

This appears to be a defunct handicrafts shop on the main street in Faringdon, seen this past summer. The reflections are mostly in the shop name, though I do like how the window reflections and that rusty grate below them make a face.

But the sign on the door says that G & L Evans is in attendance during business hours, and available by phone 24 hours a day. Google tells me that this is a funeral provider, which explains their availability, but not why they are operating out of this rundown storefront.

More urban poetry

I always wished I had a better version of this picture—I was on a bus heading back to Lisbon from Belem in 2011. I loved those yellow chimneys under that sky and wished that I could see them better. But at least I have this picture.

Urban poetry

Washington Heights last winter. Taken from the window of my car, which gives me a (very brief) moment of regret.

Sunday bird blogging

This picture is a couple of years old, but I don't think I ever posted it.

Tufted titmice always make me smile, and I'm already happy because I had a great class yesterday and now I have a week off.

Don't pet the fluffy cows

A bison calf trotting obediently after Mom in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

A large herd of bison decided to stand in the middle of the road and were in no hurry to move on, so we had plenty of time to watch them while we sat in the long line of cars. Many pictures, which I will share—really!—at some point, but this is my favorite.

The road goes ever on

Somewhere in North Dakota this past summer.

Between living with a pissed-off knee and weeks spent fighting off a a really vicious sinus infection, I have not had time or energy to devote to anything beyond the necessary weekly prep and teaching chores. (The embarrassing amount of clutter in my apartment at the moment provides ample evidence, but I'm definitely not going to document it.)

So I'm going to try to clear out some of the clutter in my blog photo files, and post a few things that don't require much explanation.

Sunday bird blogging

Pigeons on the Upper East Side.

Urban poetry

Evening on the Upper East Side this week, as the long nights begin again.

I hesitate to say it because I've been wrong many times in the past several weeks, but I think I am finally better. I haven't coughed once today.

Blue

These shapes and that color are very soothing, and I'm so sick of coughing I can use all the soothing I can get.

Sunday bird blogging

(I know it's not Sunday any more, but sue me.)

A robin noshing on berries in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park on Saturday. I took the picture with my phone so it's not that detailed, but I loved the colors.

I'm not usually that far uptown, but Saturday was our class field trip, and we went to the Museum of the City of New York on 103rd Street. The students really enjoyed it, and after the visit, some of us crossed the street and spent a little time in the park.

I had fun too, but I've been fighting a nasty sinus infection for a week, and I was more than usually exhausted after a day of being a tour guide. Still am, and the ringing in my ears is like fire alarms blaring 24 hours a day, but at least the coughing only woke me up once last night. Progress!

Sunday bird blogging

I noticed this white bird on top of a building across the block this morning. I think it's just a leucistic pigeon, but I decided to pretend that it was a dove and take it as a harbinger of peace.

Oxfordshire

I was able to explore a little on my second day in Faringdon, walking to the folly (tower) that's the main landmark.

It was closed for renovations but I wouldn't have climbed to the top anyway; just walking there used up most of my energy, and I sat for a while on a bench looking out over the Oxfordshire countryside and eating an excellent cheddar and chutney sandwich from the shop next to the inn. (I somehow managed to get completely lost trying to get back to the center of town, and found myself wandering through fields instead of quaint Cotswold streets, so it was a good thing I'd fortified myself beforehand.)

All Saints

This 12th century church was around the corner from the inn in Faringdon. I wasn't able to go inside, but I did like that headstone about to topple into the path, and the oddly jaunty pennants over the graveyard.

The church lost its spire to a Royalist cannonball during the English Civil War, and I'm not sure why they haven't built another in the almost 400 years since. Maybe it's just the cachet of being able to say Cromwell did that, as two different residents asked me if I'd seen the church and told me about the cannonball during my brief time walking around the town.

One thing about that very comfortable bed

I had a nice view of the town center from my bed, except when one of the local buses pulled up outside. It was apparently the end of the line, as the bus sat there for several minutes before leaving again, and I got to watch the people sitting on the upper deck right outside my window.

I never noticed anyone looking back, and honestly I didn't care. I just thought it was funny.

Faringdon

This is the main street in Faringdon, a historic market town on the edge of the Cotswolds, about 20 miles from Oxford.

I ended up staying there for two nights after my case of suspected appendicitis derailed my plans to go to Yorkshire. I spent the last night of the Oxford program in the John Radcliffe Hospital, and when the surgeon agreed to release me the next day, it was “on a lead”—on the condition that I stay in Oxford for the next 48 hours and return to the hospital immediately if my symptoms got worse. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to find a last-minute hotel room in Oxford on a summer weekend, ideally one that wouldn't cost as much as an Uber to Yorkshire. (I had actually checked the cost earlier that morning, when the painkillers and anti-nausea drugs had kicked in and I was delusional enough to think that maybe I could still go to Haworth if I just didn't have to haul my luggage on and off the three trains the usual journey entailed. It would have cost £700, and I wasn't delusional enough to be willing to pay that, even before I'd received the doctor's orders not to leave town.)

So that is how I ended up in Faringdon. After I was discharged, I took an Uber back to Merton, where they had kindly delayed clearing out my room. I took a shower, checked out Hotels.com and decided that Faringdon, though not technically Oxford, was close enough, and more importantly, had an available room in an old coaching inn at a reasonable price.

The town is charming, the inn was lovely, and once the Uber dropped me off I crawled into the very comfortable bed and slept for twelve hours.

Sunday bird blogging

Finally, here's another one of the cygnets I saw on the grounds. Those little fuzzy wings just slay me.

Well, this was unexpected

In the midst of the furniture-paintings-knickknacks parade were these purple ice skating costumes worn by Torvill and Dean in their gold-medal winning ice dancing performance at Sarajevo in 1984. (And adding to the incongruity, Ravel's Bolero, the music they had skated to, was playing on a loop.)

This seemed a little strange, to say the least. But I hadn't realized that Newstead isn't a National Trust property; it's actually run by the city of Nottingham. And so basically anyone famous from Nottingham—like Torvill and Dean—might get an exhibit there.

This also explains why there is a bust of D.H Lawrence next to the bust of Byron in the gardens—I spent much of my time in the garden trying to figure out the connection.

Some interiors

I admit that I do get bored very quickly wandering through historic houses looking at furniture, paintings, knickknacks, furniture, paintings, knickknacks. And much of what you see in Newstead today wasn't there during Byron's time; Thomas Wildman, who had been at Harrow with Byron and bought Newstead from him in 1818, did extensive restorations.

I did enjoy the exhibit on Ada Lovelace—mathematician, computing pioneer, and Byron's daughter—in the library. Ada never knew her father; her parents separated when she was only a month old. Although her mother loathed her father (probably with good reason) Ada doesn't seem to have had negative feelings about him. She named her son Byron, and was buried next to her father in the Byron family vault. And though her mother was a less than ideal parent—in letters, she referred to her daughter as “it”—she did encourage her interest in mathematics as a way of avoiding the insanity she believed Ada might have inherited from her father.

The grounds

I felt a little like Elizabeth Bennet visiting Pemberley for the first time as I walked through the woods and gardens on the estate.

But while she was thinking, If I had accepted Mr. Darcy, I could be mistress of all this, I was thinking, How come I didn't have a great-uncle with a barony and no other heirs?

Saturday reflections

Reeds reflected in one of the pools in the Newstead gardens.

More Newstead Abbey

Some exterior shots of the enormous main house, plus a bust of the poet in one of the gardens.

Newstead Priory (it was never an abbey, but the owners who acquired it after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries thought that an abbey sounded grander than a priory) dated from the 12th century, founded by Henry II as part of his penance for the murder of Thomas á Becket.

Boatswain

This memorial in the gardens at Newstead is for Byron's beloved dog, Boatswain, who died of rabies. Byron had wanted to be buried nearby, but when he died in 1824, he no longer owned Newstead and had been living abroad for many years because of the backlash to his scandalous lifestyle. He ended up buried in the family vault at St. Mary Magdalene Church, with a somewhat less impressive memorial than the one he had erected for Boatswain.

The inscription reads, in part:

Near this Spot

are deposited the Remains of one

who possessed Beauty Without Vanity,

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferosity,

and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.

This Praise, which would be unmeaning flattery

if inscribed over Human Ashes,

is but a just tribute to the Memory of

BOATSWAIN, A DOG,

who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803,

and died at Newstead Abbey Nov. 18, 1808.

Lifestyles of the Rich (or at least Titled) and Famous

Lord Byron's bed at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Byron inherited the estate along with the title from a great-uncle when he was only ten years old, and it is impressive: a huge Gothic house, gardens, a lake where the previous Lord Byron had staged mock naval battles.

Unfortunately there was no money to maintain it and during the brief periods when Byron actually lived there, he reportedly slept with this gun next to his bed because the state of the windows and doors made the house impossible to secure and the ruffians in nearby Sherwood Forest were an ongoing threat.

More urban poetry

A sunny day in October on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan: restaurants just opening for lunch, a biker pausing to make a phone call, and a stove that has for some reason been abandoned at the curb.

Urban poetry

I loved the warning signs on this building in Windsor—not Keep Out, or Caution, but If you really must proceed, you clueless pillock, go DEAD SLOW.

I also liked that the company name on the window at the top is Junk Design. I think they've succeeded admirably.

I did see an Amazon truck pull up while I was taking pictures. The driver parked well away and made the delivery on foot.

I am still here

Sunday bird blogging

King penguins and seals at Elsehul Bay in South Georgia on New Year's Day.

I've mentioned that I've been taking many more buses this year because my bad knee keeps me from walking as much as I'm used to. I took a crowded bus down Broadway on my way home from class yesterday, and though I had a book I was too tired to look at it and watched my fellow passengers instead.

And was struck, surprisingly, by the basic decency I saw. People were jostling for standing room along with several large suitcases, a stroller, and one overloaded shopping cart, and maneuvering your way to the rear door to get off wasn't for the faint-hearted, but everyone was—nice. They tried to move out of the way where they could, and a blind man and a woman with a walker boarded and were immediately given seats.

It was a little bit of reassurance in these very dark times.

Urban poetry

Here's an old picture: a foggy wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2019. It has been so unrelentingly humid here recently (like 90% or close to it) that any outdoor exertion, however mild, leaves me literally soaked to the skin with perspiration.

Which for some reason reminded me of the thick fogs in Nova Scotia, which were just as drenching but not nearly so unpleasant.

Sunday bird blogging

Another towhee (or maybe the same towhee) in Berkeley a while back.

Yesterday I was waiting for the bus down Fifth Avenue after class—the knee was very achy and there was no possibility of walking all the way home—and when a bus finally came, it was so crowded it didn't even stop. The MTA app said the next bus wasn't due for another ten minutes, so I sat down on a bench by the park wall and closed my eyes. And one of my fellow passengers came over to get me a couple of minutes later. “A bus is coming! And it's empty!” I would probably have missed it if she hadn't alerted me and that little kindness made my day, almost as much as the student who'd told me my class was “awesome” earlier that afternoon.

It's difficult to feel optimistic about anything right now, so I try to revel in the positive moments when I can.

Wild, wild horses -- we'll ride them someday

With the country growing progressively more insane by the hour, I find this picture of a wild horse wandering along the top of a ridge in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota very calming.