Monday Updates: Longwood Planning, etc.
Longwood: It looks like there are a few folks interested in going to Longwood on December 12th. I think I'm going to do the majority of planning of this off-lj (since a few folks who want to go aren't on LJ), so if you're interested, please let me know and I'll email you to let you know what's up. Books and conservatories and fire pits and good stuff like that, for anyone interested.
Fall: Most of the fall color display is done here, many of the trees are bare, and what's left is fading to dull browns, so the woods look like collections of old birch broom, bristles up, with clumps of dust clinging to them.
Still, yesterday I saw a few late oaks in scarlet splendor, glowing red in the evening sun, and it was enough to make me want to pull the car over and stare at the magic of it, more dramatic than any stained glass, lasting longer than fireworks, and all of it working cell by cell as the tree altered the distribution and production of pigmented chemicals in response to light level and temperature alteration.
I thought about the paradigm of domestication of plants; how we are (as Michael Pollan put it), from the plant's point of view, merely a more sophisticated kind of bee, such that producing fruit or nutrients or chemicals that make the monkeys happy mean that the monkeys help propagate you around the planet and work for your interests. Most of the plants we use in landscaping aren't there for their industrial value as a primary interest; we aren't generally growing the oaks because we'll need the wood, nor the sap from the sugar maples. We grow them around our houses because we like the way the willows move in the wind or the sight of the birch trunks in snow in winter.
It is an extravagance of prosperity to be able to have superfluous beauty around. Having the plants there just because they please us is a privilege and, to some extent, a display of prosperity.
But I wonder what the trees think of it all. Come to think of it, they've been doing the aesthetic appeal route for a while, with the original bees and flowers trick, so I'm sure they think nothing of tarting it up for us.
Health: Sleeping sixteen hours a day for the full weekend seems to have me back to rights. I even cleaned the worst spots in the house.
Nano: I'm at about 35k. I have half the month left. I am telling myself that if I finish early, I can buy myself some bad novels to read. This feels good, except that it seems every time I've set myself a large block of time to write I end up either sleeping from sheer exhaustion or stuck. I seems to do better with fitting in writing when I can rather than planning too much for it.
Social: I did get out a little over the weekend, making it out to dinner with Liz and Phil, whom I hadn't seen in a while. I gave them the last of my brownies. They made pie. Then there was fire and I roasted my socks for a while.
Fall: Most of the fall color display is done here, many of the trees are bare, and what's left is fading to dull browns, so the woods look like collections of old birch broom, bristles up, with clumps of dust clinging to them.
Still, yesterday I saw a few late oaks in scarlet splendor, glowing red in the evening sun, and it was enough to make me want to pull the car over and stare at the magic of it, more dramatic than any stained glass, lasting longer than fireworks, and all of it working cell by cell as the tree altered the distribution and production of pigmented chemicals in response to light level and temperature alteration.
I thought about the paradigm of domestication of plants; how we are (as Michael Pollan put it), from the plant's point of view, merely a more sophisticated kind of bee, such that producing fruit or nutrients or chemicals that make the monkeys happy mean that the monkeys help propagate you around the planet and work for your interests. Most of the plants we use in landscaping aren't there for their industrial value as a primary interest; we aren't generally growing the oaks because we'll need the wood, nor the sap from the sugar maples. We grow them around our houses because we like the way the willows move in the wind or the sight of the birch trunks in snow in winter.
It is an extravagance of prosperity to be able to have superfluous beauty around. Having the plants there just because they please us is a privilege and, to some extent, a display of prosperity.
But I wonder what the trees think of it all. Come to think of it, they've been doing the aesthetic appeal route for a while, with the original bees and flowers trick, so I'm sure they think nothing of tarting it up for us.
Health: Sleeping sixteen hours a day for the full weekend seems to have me back to rights. I even cleaned the worst spots in the house.
Nano: I'm at about 35k. I have half the month left. I am telling myself that if I finish early, I can buy myself some bad novels to read. This feels good, except that it seems every time I've set myself a large block of time to write I end up either sleeping from sheer exhaustion or stuck. I seems to do better with fitting in writing when I can rather than planning too much for it.
Social: I did get out a little over the weekend, making it out to dinner with Liz and Phil, whom I hadn't seen in a while. I gave them the last of my brownies. They made pie. Then there was fire and I roasted my socks for a while.