In my lazy way, I tried searching for photos I've taken on December 2's past, thinking I'd take the easy way out today and post old photos from Flickr. And the only hit was this one:
My climbing partner Mike at Red Rocks outside Las Vegas. 2007. I remember those rocks. They reside still in my fingertips.
Here are some photos I took on our couple of trips to Red Rocks. Marvelous memories of balancing on rock.
Those are my rock shoes dangling down there, in case you're wondering. They are 5.10s, pink.
I've undertaken several blogpost-a-day projects over the past decade-plus—of which this here is a shortened, sputtering version. In the past, I've actually managed to follow through—every day, for 365 days—some four or five times. It's a good practice for me. I don't know why it's become so difficult. Or rather, why I've become so lackadaisical. I mean, sure, it doesn't really matter if I succeed. But it's the principle of the thing. It's a way of paying attention, staying engaged. Surely that matters.
Years ago, beginning in 2007, I undertook a few photo-a-day projects, which I posted on Flickr—where, back before FB sunk its hooks into me, I was quite active. Here are the links:
Project 365 (begun on May 23, 2007—my mother's birthday, her last one with us—with the above photo) Project 365, Take 2 (begun January 1, 2009) 365:3 (begun August 9, 2010) Photo-a-Day, Take 4 (begun December 23, 2012, in the days when I was enamored with Snapseed tools)
The daily blogpost projects are, I suppose, an elaborate version of those daily photos-plus-captions.
As Mary Oliver famously wrote:
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
I guess that's what I'm trying to do with all of these projects: pay attention, find something fascinating or beautiful or moving or funny (etc.), and tell about it.
Today I created a new album on Flickr, Project 365 Take 5, and posted this shot, from breakfast out while we waited for our car to be serviced. (I love condiment caddies, what can I say?) Perhaps heading back to simpler expectations is good for me just now, when my daily to-do list manages to be all over the place. If I manage to make one at all.
It's possible I will remember tomorrow, and post a second photo. And then, continue following through until next November 30. Wish me luck!
I have been meaning for ages to get into the garage and do a thorough sorting-and-culling. And today I started—not through any great resolve, but because I thought I might get into the mood by cleaning out the pantry. The pantry should be easier than the garage, right?
Wrong.
I was immediately hit by nostalgia—a gold-leaf vase that was my mother's; lacquer soup bowls, a sake set, tiny condiment dishes from our (second) honeymoon in Japan, lo these 43 years ago; a somewhat chipped set of Limoges china that was my grandmother's. But I also found myself unable to deal with the useful stuff.
What if I made space in the garage and just started moving the pantry objects there? Wouldn't that make it easier to assess keepability? Clear out from the pantry everything but actual food and cooking tools.
Sure, I said hopefully.
And so I waded into the garage. (It's not really that bad—we're not full-on hoarders. But out of sight, out of mind, and somehow more and more stuff manages to get dropped into the "out of sight" void.)
We have two large sets of shelving, on either side of one half of the garage. We set them up almost fifteen years ago now, when we remodeled. Brand-new house! Spanking-clean garage! And when we moved our stuff back from storage, most everything that wasn't furniture or kitchen gear went straight into the garage. (That includes many, many books, but they're in the other half of the garage. Out of sight!) And there it has sat.
Some shelves do get fairly frequent visits—the one holding the toolbox, the ones holding camping and backpacking gear, the one with TP, paper towels, and other household items. I pretty well have an idea what's on the left side of the garage. The right side, though? It's a mystery. But a mystery I feel ready to tackle.
Today, I succeeded in dealing with three whole shelves, of fifteen (on the left, easy side). Huzzah! One held many dozens of rock climbing guides and ski manuals. I culled about two-thirds of those, but am (for now) keeping a few. (Nostalgia.) I'm hoping the owner of the rock gym in town might want the castoffs. Another shelf held some office supplies, some of which I have moved into the (also-needing-attention) "bill-paying room," as we call the little household office. And there were miscellaneous items: a jump rope (huh?), a dSLR sensor cleaner, my father's old Schief protractor set, an old hair dryer, which for now are in a box ready to go... somewhere. Eventually, I envision a run to our local dump, and its resale store.
In the meantime, I will take photos of anything of sentimental value I see no need to keep but still want to remember. As I did when we cleaned out my mother's house after her death in 2008, keeping some of her things but mostly just taking photos. Maybe I'll finally be able to let go of the things I kept.
Anyway, I mentioned podcasts above. One was Ezra Klein talking with Patti Smith ⬇︎. The other was First Draft and a conversation with poet Diane Seuss. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, grounded, wise, thoughtful women.
And for Diane, here's a poem she read. It's fourteen lines, and maybe it counts as one of her sonnets?
[Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions.]
Diane Seuss
Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions. That all at its essence is dove-gray.
Wipe the lipstick off the mouth of anything and there you will find dove-gray. With my
thumb I have smudged away the sky's blue and the water's blue and found, when I kicked it
with my shoe, even the sand at its essence is pelican-gray. I am remembering Eden.
How everything swaggered with color. How the hollyhocks finished each other's sentences.
How I missed predatory animals and worrying about being eaten. How I missed being eaten.
How the ocean and the continent are essentially love on a terrible mission to meet up with itself.
How even with the surface roiling, the depths are calmly nursing away at love. That look the late
nurser gets in its eyes as it sucks: a habitual, complacent peace. How to mother that peace, to wean
it, is a terrible career. And to smudge beauty is to discover ugliness. And to smudge ugliness is to be
knocked back by splendor. How every apple is the poison apple. How rosy the skin. How sweet
the flesh. How to suck the apple's poison is the one true meal, the invocation and the Last
Supper. How stillness nests at the base of wind's spine. How even gravestones buckle and well
with the tides. And coffins are little wayward ships making their way toward love's other shore.
I stumbled on a delightful comedy from Spain the other week, Old Dog, New Tricks—or in Spanish, simply Animal. I'm enjoying being in a different place—Galicia—and listening to the Spanish, much of which I (tell myself I) understand, though of course without the subtitles I'd be pretty lost. "Much" not necessarily being "enough."
It got me thinking about other foreign series I've enjoyed, such as the irresistible Crash Landing on You from Korea:
And Lilyhammer, which is in English and Norwegian:
And the Danish/Swedish The Bridge (Broen/Bron):
I know I've encountered a couple of mystery/police series recently from Iceland and Finland (good old nordic noir). In any case, it got me wondering what foreign series are on Netflix right now, and wouldn't you know, there are lists!
In fact, Netflix's own website Tudum is a wealth of information for anyone wanting a Top Ten list, not just for now or for foreign series, but going back in time, week by week, to June 2021. You can filter for "Global" and "Non-English," and pow, all sorts of suggestions. Like, right now, the top ten are Last Samurai Standing (Japan), Dynamite Kiss (Korea), The Crystal Cuckoo (Spain), As You Stood By (Korean), Envious (Argentina), Delhi Crime (India), Rulers of Fortune (Brazil), Physical: Asia (Korea), 50 Seconds: The Fernando Báez Sosa Case (Argentina, documentary), and The Asset (Denmark).
If I google "Netflix series in German" (or French or Italian or...), a Netflix page shows me all the usual categories: Your Next Watch, Bingeworthy, Crime, International Drama, etc. etc. etc. Presumably, I could spend all of 2026 watching only German shows! But David might not like that so much...
I even found a feature for learning Spanish via the (dubbed) Big Bang Theory:
Anyway, I might try one of the above top ten shows—maybe stay in Spain with The Crystal Cuckoo—once I've finished off a few series and am casting about for what's next.
All this despite the fact that I really don't like subtitles, because my attention becomes so split between what's going on on the screen and what's being said. Of course, that's sometimes the case even with English-language shows (The Wire, and many British shows: subtitles have come in handy). And if I have some smattering of the language, my attention split actually becomes three-way, since I try to listen as well, but listening to another language requires effort.
Maybe I'll go for a Finnish series—Deadwind or Bordertown are two possibilities—to do away with that third splitting of attention. Finnish being nothing more than background noise to my ears—unless someone says terve (hi) or sauna. Or, yes, Korean, where I understand not a single word. Maybe I'll rewatch Crash Landing on You. I really did love that show.
I've only ever seen a porcupine once in the wild, forty-four years ago—on our honeymoon, when we camped our way up through Utah (where we spotted this amazing creature), to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, then back down through Washington and Oregon. Great trip!
The porcupine we saw was a North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum, the genus name coming from the Greek for "to irritate," the full name meaning, loosely, "the animal with the irritating back"). It is the second-largest rodent—yes, it's a rodent—of North America (after the beaver), reaching 3 feet in length (plus a foot-long tail) and some 20 pounds in weight.
What brought this animal to mind was an orange-spined hairy dwarf porcupine that the photographer of vanishing animals Joel Sartore posted on FB. He photographed it near Rio de Janeiro and comments that this species, Sphiggurus villosus, is "found throughout parts of South America [and] occurs in a wide range of habitats including tropical savannahs, wetlands, and rainforests. They are most active at night, and are sometimes spotted near human communities." These cute creatures are up to 18 inches long (plus tail, which is almost as long) and weigh up to 5.5 pounds.
And that's just two of the 29 species of porcupine: 17 in the New World, 11 in the Old, and I don't know where that other species lives. Not Antarctica, that much is sure. (I'm just googling, and when one googles the natural world, the results are invariably all over the place. These numbers are from Wikipedia, and clearly no one did the math.) There are two families, the Erezithontidae, in North and South America, and the Hystricidae, in southern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Each family has three genera. The two families are only distantly related, but are classified within the same infraorder (Hystricognathi) of Rodentia (along with various other rodents such as mole rats—naked and otherwise—agoutis, chinchillas, and guinea pigs), their commonality being the unique bone structure of their skulls.
The largest porcupine is the crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata), found from Italy into sub-Saharan Africa. It weighs up to 60 pounds. The longest of its quills are 14 inches long, and when it shakes them it produces a hissing sound like a rattlesnake. It's also the second-longest-living rodent (after the naked mole rat), living up to 28 years (the mole rat: 37).
The smallest is the Roosmalen's dwarf porcupine (Coendou roosmalenorum), an arboreal species that lives chiefly in the Madeira biogeographical province of northern Brazil. "Squirrel-sized," it weighs a little over 2 pounds. Only a few sightings are confirmed.
Here is Rico, a Brazilian porcupine (Coendou prehensilis) who was a favorite of visitors at the Cincinnati Zoo. Sadly, he died this spring after a short illness from a liver infection, age 8.
And because it's impossible to get too much of Rico, here's a demonstration of his prehensile tail—and more!
Finally, in case you were wondering, the name porcupine comes, via Latin porcus 'pig' + spina 'spine, quill', from Old Italian porcospino, 'thorn-pig'. Well named! As is the German Stachelschwein, basically the same meaning. Porcospino. Stachelschwein. I may be muttering these two words under my breath for the next few days, until I find something new to fascinate me...
And finally, porcupines and hedgehogs are not related. Don't get me started.
P.S. Yes, two posts today, because heck—I can make it to 100 by the end of the year. I can do it! (I shoulda included my book reports in the numbered posts. What was I thinking?)
P.P.S. Yes, I might just have to do a post that features the naked mole rat.
P.P.P.S. And one on the hedgehog, of which there are 17 species—good grief, who knew?
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth. After nearly 50 years in space, NASA’s Voyager 1 is about to hit a historic milestone. By November 15, 2026, it will be 16.1 billion miles (25.9 billion km) away, meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it.
An artist's rendition, obviously
And so I looked it up, having misread the 2026 as 2025, thinking this amazing event would be celebrated far and wide! Well, no, not yet. So I did a little research (starting with an informative article from, of all places, USA Today) and thought I'd share some of it here. Some factoids, a few diagrams, even a video or two. More than you ever wanted to know! But I found it fascinating. Human ingenuity at its best.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. It is traveling 10.6 miles a second. (Light, meanwhile, travels 186,282 miles a second.)
Curiously, Voyager 2 was launched earlier, on August 20, 1977. This was because it had a longer (more distant) mission and different trajectory than V1. It is also traveling a little slower, at 9.6 miles a second. (It is presently only 19.5 light-hours away from Earth, and I find no estimate of when it might reach a light-day away.)
Both missions included exploring Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980 for V1, and 1981 for V2), but V2 then continued on to fly by Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).
Here's a NASA video titled "A Once-in-176-Year Chance! Why Voyager Launched in 1977":
Voyager 1 left the solar system on August 25, 2012 (meaning it crossed the heliopause, the band where the solar wind's pressure is balanced by the pressure of the interstellar medium). Since entering interstellar space, the craft has been studying plasma waves, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields in the heliosphere.
Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in 2018. Only two other probes have or are on the way to accomplishing this feat: Pioneer 10 and 11. Launched in 1972 and '73, they crossed Neptune's orbit in 1983 and 1990, respectively. In the meantime, however, both have ceased to transmit (2003 in the case of 10, still earlier for 11), so their present location is unknown (though I bet a science wonk could calculate a pretty good estimate). Meanwhile, New Horizons (launched in 2006)is presently in the Kuiper Belt (home most famously of poor demoted Pluto), which it will exit in 2028 or 2029—and then on to the heliopause!But for now and ever, Voyage 1 is winning the race.
And what is the big gray band, well beyond the heliosphere? Why, it's the Oort Cloud, of course—a theoretical donut-shaped band composed of trillions of icy objects—including water, ethane, and methane ices—left over from the formation of the solar system). Which Voyager 1 won't reach for another 300 years, and it won't leave it—assuming it survives all that ice—for 3,000.
So we're quite happy with this little new milestone of a light-day! Only one earth-year to wait!
I ran across a rule just now that I'd never heard of before: the Ablaut reduplication rule. In which a repeated word changes its vowel in a particular pattern, usually i, a, o. For example:
chit chat dilly dally hip hop tip top
Or with three syllables: stink stank stunk.
The pattern isn't random: it's a sequence that embraces the movement of the tongue in the mouth, from higher to lower. Ablaut in German means, essentially, "down-sound."
This reminded me that just the other day I was talking with some friends about the correct order of adjectives in English, but we couldn't remember the rule. So here's one suggestion:
determiner (a, the, my) quantity (three, several) opinion (subjective qualities: beautiful, amazing, unusual) size (large, small, multi-armed) age (young, ancient) shape (round, obese, heart-shaped) color (red, green, polkadot) origin (French, Martian) material (what the thing is made of: wood, gold, plastic) purpose (what the thing is used for, often ending in -ing: gardening, sports, cleaning) noun
Or perhaps (from a different source): opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, color origin, material, type, purpose + noun.
I think the discrepancy in the two lists comes from the fact that you would never use all these qualifiers in a single sentence. Try it! I dare you!
The three beautiful little ancient round blue Venetian glass candle snifters.
Yeah, that doesn't sound right. Too many adjectives. The editor in me says, pare it back!
The three lovely little round Venetian glass candle snifters. That's better. We don't need to know how old they are, or their color. Or if we do, then maybe don't need to know they're little and round.
I will refrain from looking up (and expounding on) other English rules. That's enough for one session.
But I'm kind of glad to have run across a new rule, and to understand why it exists.
