Saturday reflections

Reflections from 34th Street across from Macy's, a few weeks ago.

I survived the first day of classes. My students are of course delightful, but there are more than thirty of them—twice as many as I started with last semester—and just keeping track of the flow of forms across my desk was daunting.

I am tired. It's a good tired, but I am so, so tired.

Astronomy Tuesday

I've mentioned that I am always fascinated by images of Pluto because when I was first learning about astronomy, the only pictures available showed a blurry gray blob that honestly could have been anything.

This is a color-enhanced version of an image captured by the New Horizons probe in 2015. It took New Horizons almost ten years and 3 billion miles to reach Pluto—three billion miles! Humans actually built something that made that trip and sent back pictures. And yes, Pluto looks like a nicely toasted meringue in this picture, but still—three billion miles.

Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute

Sunday bird blogging

I have not made it to the park to see the incoming migration, despite the best of intentions. Classes start on Saturday, and I have almost twice as many students as I did last semester. I'd forgotten how much time printing, collating, and stapling take (and how many materials you need for a day's worth of classes), and because there are so many students I can't print all the copies I need on my tiny home printer. So I'm spending my Labor Day schlepping uptown to use the copy machines at school.

But a titmouse will always make me smile.

Speaking of Sunriver

Two more landscapes from Eclipse Summer.

Saturday reflections

An appropriately bucolic scene for the end of summer.

This is an overlooked photo from 2017 in Sunriver, Oregon, when I went to see the eclipse. It was hard for mere landscapes to compete with the perhaps once in a lifetime experience of photographing the sun, and I never got around to processing this picture.

Urban poetry

I got a new phone recently and while reveling in what seems like (at least temporarily) an unlimited amount of storage and a much better camera, I found quite a few old pictures I'd forgotten about.

I took this one in 2018, when what is now the former phone was brand new, from the approach to the Manhattan Bridge heading towards Brooklyn. I was clearly using some kind of filter because the graffiti isn't quite this psychedelic in real life, and I'd like to go back and try for some more realistic images.

Water feature, plus cows

Summer, upstate New York.

There was no place to pull over, but I was the only one on the road so I just stopped the car and rolled down the window to take this picture. I might have liked to try to get the cows from a better angle, but I had an appointment with the alpacas and couldn't hang around.

Breakfast room

I was apparently the only one eating breakfast, so the amount of food was a little more than I needed. And I kept hoping someone would show up and sit in the thrones, but they remained empty.

The Manor Life

Some of the beautiful parkland around the hotel. There were a few other people walking through the park in the late afternoon and the following morning, but I was mostly on my own. Not nearly as alone as I was at the hotel, though.

The hotel is a Mock Tudor mansion, originally a private home, and since only one of the other rooms was occupied, I felt like a houseguest invited for the weekend by someone I barely knew who disappeared shortly after I'd arrived.

Saturday reflections

I turned my alpaca quest into a mini-vacation by staying overnight at a hotel in northern New Jersey. It turned out to be a very odd and wonderful place, in the middle of a state park so there were beautiful, extensive grounds.

Today I'm lying on my bed watching Project Runway and waiting to see if I have Covid again (negative so far—fingers crossed.) I've realized that one of many ways our lives have changed in the past three years is that I used to wake up feeling a little under the weather and be able to decide whether or not I was going to try to power through. And even if I knew that I had been around someone who was sick (as I was this week) I would just think, Oh no, I guess I caught that cold.

But Covid is different. I had to isolate, stay home, miss the second day of placement testing, and wait to see whether I'm “officially” sick or not.

A few final alpacas

I think these are the last of the alpaca pictures. I particularly love the way the pattern from the shearing on the alpaca on the bottom left makes her look like she's wearing a sweater. (And a fancy hat!)

Another alpaca snuggle

I understand the impulse; I wanted to snuggle up with them, too.