Urban poetry

Another overlooked shot from Seattle.

I thought I had seldom seen a less promising venue for the creation and/or consumption of quality beer, but I looked at the website, and it is much more charming when it's open for business.

What qualifies it as true urban poetry though is this:

At Peddler, we strive to be a gathering place for beer lovers and support bicycling as an awesome way to get around our beautiful city.

Beer and bicycling!

Astronomy Tuesday

The Galileo spacecraft spent eight years exploring Jupiter beginning in 1995, and the images have now been remastered.

This is a new look at Europa, calibrated to approximate what the human eye would see. There may be a liquid ocean under that icy surface, and if so, it's the most likely location for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SETI Institute, Cynthia Phillips, Marty Valenti

Pulling the wool

It's back to work tomorrow, and while I didn't get as much accomplished at home as I'd hoped -- despite throwing out bags and bags of junk, and making three trips to the Salvation Army, my apartment looks pretty much the same way it did before I started -- I did manage to complete one of my many art projects.

I always love fibers and fabrics but they're even more appealing when it starts to get cold outside. I find knitting soothing, but trying to follow complicated patterns takes the fun out of it for me. So I've been felting.

I first made felt seven or eight years ago, when I'd broken my left hand and I was looking for new activities that would help me get my strength and dexterity back. Basic felting is easy enough -- you add soap and hot water to wool, and roll it and rub it and throw it around and it turns into felt -- and it was an excellent workout for my hands (and elbows and shoulders and back.)

The problem was what to do with the end product. I played around with mixing colors and adding silk or metallic threads, and the felt I made was pretty, and it was definitely felt -- thick and solid and strong -- but I didn't really have any use for it. I cut it up and used it for coasters and pot holders and a couple of pieces are still glued to the bottoms of lamps, but I quickly exhausted the potential uses. I threw the scraps away and moved on to something else.

I've been seeing a lot of beautiful felt work in the past few years though, much nicer than anything I had available for inspiration during my own brief feltmaking career. Then I discovered Moy Mackay, a Scottish artist who creates beautiful Impressionistic landscapes out of wool, and I decided that I would try to do an Alaskan landscape.

I bought some wool roving and gave it a try, and the results would have shamed your average five year old, who could have kicked my ass with a sheet of paper and a box of Crayolas. (Jayne said, “Well, you can tell that's the sky." And she was being generous.)

So I thought something a little less ambitious might be called for. Like flowers. Really big flowers so I didn't have to worry about a lot of detail (which tends to migrate in unexpected ways when the wool starts doing its thing.) And I'm pleased with the result. I had planned to add some hand stitched detail but I like the way the colors bleed into each other, so I'm leaving it as plain old felt. Click to enlarge.

Sunday bird blogging

A tufted titmouse surveys the Ramble, in Central Park.

Further along those lines….

A quote (via SwissMiss) that perfectly describes why I find travel so important. Of course, part of it just incurable curiosity (some might even say “nosiness") about the world and everything and everyone in it. And part of it is that I tend to be timid and you only learn to be brave by doing things that frighten you.

But I've also learned that I am never so much myself as when I'm somewhere I've never been before. So much of our lives is necessarily spent in the habitual, the familiar: wake, work, eat, sleep. Wash the dishes. Laugh with friends. Worry about money or a wayward child. When I'm somewhere new, somewhere else, habits necessarily fall away -- I'm still eating but it's different foods, sleeping, but in strange beds -- and eventually the stresses and worries do as well. (Brooding about something my boss said becomes much less urgent when I'm in an Italian train station wrestling with a ticket machine that has apparently decided I won't be on the next train to Rome after all.)

Without the pinch of routine, you not only recognize what's really you, you expand to be even more of yourself. Strange places, strange people, the challenges of navigation, all push at you. And you push back.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. 

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

--Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

Saturday reflections

Seattle.

While enjoying my staycation this week, I realized that this is the first year since I was able to start traveling again that I never actually left the United States.

But even though you don't need a passport to go there, I think Alaska really should count as a foreign country. So far away -- I could fly to several places in Europe faster than I could get back to Fairbanks -- so beautiful, so strange.

I'm already looking forward to a new year in travel though -- starting with a most unexpected opportunity to visit Istanbul and points east in April, and a tentative return to Scotland (yes, I've been watching Outlander, and I want to see more of the Highlands) in September.

Urban poetry

I think we can all agree that every bridge (or overpass) ought to have a troll living underneath, but in Seattle they've done something about it.

My sympathies to anyone attempting to fly around the United States today. Although the big storm moved a little more out to sea than expected and we will not be having a white Thanksgiving after all, it was a chilly day with precipitation that couldn't make up its mind between rain and snow and just gave us both, in enormous quantities, from morning to early evening.

Trolls may prefer cold damp hiding places (at least if there are a few delicious billy goats to snack on) but I spent a completely useless afternoon wallowing in the luxury of having nowhere I had to be,  with tea and a fat book and a blanket, and I can assure you I look much happier than this guy.

Astronomy Tuesday

This beauty is the Tulip Nebula, in Cygnus.

Image Credit and Copyright: J-P Metsävainio (Astro Anarchy)

Sunday bird blogging

Thanksgiving is the week of big birds, so here's a very large red-tailed hawk in Central Park a couple of years ago.

Like most humans, I have my real dark nights of the soul, but mine tend to be on weekday afternoons, and not at three o'clock in the morning. I'm seldom awake then, for one thing -- I don't usually fall asleep easily but once I'm out, I'm out -- and while I realize the 3 am is meant metaphorically, I like the middle of the night. I like the quiet and the darkness and burrowing back in warm blankets after a quick pee, knowing that there's hours of sleep still before the nagging of the alarm clock.

What's even better is getting up in the middle of the night as I did last night and realizing that I have an entire week of sleep ahead of me -- nothing I have to do, nowhere I have to go. I haven't stayed at home on vacation for a very long time.

Saturday reflections

Brick within brick.

I took this picture in June, in Chicago, but it has an autumnal air, with the leafless vines snaking up the bricks against the growly sky.

Urban poetry

I love old signs, faded, usually obsolete, painted on the sides of buildings. This one happens to be in Portland, but there are many more of them in New York, like ghosts of a city that no longer exists, directing you to establishments that no one remembers.

Astronomy Tuesday

So this is what a comet looks like.

Philae, the lander for the Rosetta mission, landed safely on the surface of C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but sadly not in a position where its solar panels received enough light to keep it going. So this sort of selfie -- the lander's foot is in the bottom left corner -- may be the best photo we get.

Image Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA