The reality is that reality is weird
I reconstruct who I am and what I’m connected to every day when I get up.
I’m discombobulated until I see what the world looks like, what the internet has to show.
When no one else is up, that’s when I sing. Because if I don’t do it periodically, now that we don’t go to church, and do not have our folksinging group, my vocal chords get weird, rough, scatchy – and it scares the heck out of me, because my singing voice, and the ability to sing loudly and well is still an important part of that ‘self.’
I am a singer.
This morning it was Bridge over troubled water a capella, with Simon and Garfunkle in my head.
And Root like a rose with Emmylou Harris on Youtube. And Abide with me, which we listened to in an Irish TV show with a burial. Lovely, but I had to work with it to get the lifts in the right place in the melody because I have lyrics and video – but no sheet music.
And The sisters of mercy with Leonard Cohen – beautiful gravelly voice on his own song.
And now I’m ready to face that part of the day.
The sun was so weird.
I went to check on the plants by our only east window, to see if they had enough water with the instrument I have. They did.
But in the window was the image above, EAST – not north or west – the rising sun was even more blood red, from the fires, than the image I captured after I fetched the iPhone.
Apocalyptic.
Somewhere in Pride’s Children PURGATORY it says something about the tourists too stupid to know that magnificent sunsets out over the Pacific are caused by air pollution.
But this was sunRISE, and in the opposite direction.
It just had to be food for thought.
I was up too early, couldn’t get back to sleep. I’ll crash later for a while.
Swimming has been canceled
Because they don’t want us exposed to the bad quality air, it is recommended that we not spend time outside right now, and of course the indoor pool was not made available.
Something about the county may be responsible for both: I’m not going to blame management – they’re trying.
We’ve been told to just let next week’s schedule’s signups be this week’s, so people don’t have to stand in line today to get a couple of slots next week.
I’m not going to complain about little restrictions when there are people losing their lives and their homes (including two of our staff members who live in Vacaville and lost their homes).
But I’ve really got to stop asking, “Now what?” Because it keeps coming up with ‘whats.’ The universe. Karma. Bad luck.
Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s best SF program
A MPB program to teach kids about libraries and the Dewey Decimal System – by using a SF story set in the future when actual books had disappeared. Prescient? Or just logical.
From The New Yorker:
If for some strange reason you’ve never heard of “Tomes and Talismans,” just know this: it’s quite possibly the finest post-apocalyptic educational series about library science ever produced by Mississippi Public Television.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/library-science-fiction-tomes-and-talismans
This is from 1986.
The kids and I watched it when we homeschooled. We were talking with the offspring just last night, and it came up, and we all agreed it was pretty interesting (especially for its time) even if dated.
You can find the first episode on Youtube – but they never finished their promise to put it up for sale or viewing, so I left a message to that effect on the MPB Facebook page, and got the response, “Good idea!” when I suggested it was a good one for the kids during the pandemic – and their parents. We’ll see if anything happens.
Meanwhile, having an eldest educated at Caltech in Computer Science, I have been given a link to a place where I can see it.
The pigeons have tried to move in
For some unfathomable reason, some of the Davis pigeons have decided that our bare concrete fourth-floor balcony with a few folding chairs is a suitable place to spend time.
It wouldn’t be a problem except 1) they coo constantly, and 2) they poo constantly.
So I am using a plastic syringe and a container of water (because I can’t find my water pistol) to discourage them.
I sit by the window all day, attempting to write fiction. It cannot be done with a cooer in the background.
And now I am reconnected to the world and the internet, about to visit the Washington Post and The New York Times briefly to see how the pandemic is going, and try to get to work for the day. I’m getting very good at ignoring the stories, hitting just the terrible headlines and graphs.
So drop a line about how you reconnect with your self and your world every morning.
Or is it just me?
I have no idea where WordPress put Categories, so we don’t have any today.
I also don’t know where the list of previous Tags is stored, so I could choose them.
liebjabberings 
I step out to my porch with a double espresso in the early, early morning. Still dark. A bat flitted around my porch light earlier this week. I connect by journaling for a few minutes. I head in the other direction, I try to connect to my mind as it wakes for a new day.
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I start the day by feeding the cats. No getting around that! Read The Root and the NYT newsletter. Look at my notifications on Facebook. Used to reconnect by talking to my husband. Sometimes, I still do. I miss his answers.
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I am so sad for you. Such a huge loss in so many ways. And you can’t explain to the kitties.
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Some days are strange like that, mine are usually Tuesdays. I’m debating returning to the pool. I need more exercise and I miss it. Finishing Tuesdays with pool is a good one for me. It’s been near 6 months since I swam.
Glad you’re singing 😀
Weird about the pigeons, but who knows how the plague has affected everything.
I think I was 12 when I realized that the west coast has way more vibrant warm colors in its sunsets. I have long noted this. I had never even thought of pollution! Also, in the south, more pinks. We had a lot of pink sunsets in Georgia, we called them girly sunsets. They’re rare here. I do think we get nice twilight here in the Midwest. I was in high school when I realized our twilight time is superior. I haven’t seen much of the world outside the US. I wonder if someone is on a photographic journey to capture sunsets around the world?
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There are not as many pool people here as I would have expected, but we need our water time – the pandemic cost me my favorite late-afternoon summer swims (we’d go down late enough so sunscreen wasn’t necessary). Now the fires are costing me the little remaining time I had – and the county is against opening the indoor pool again, for some reason.
Why move to a facility with five pools if you don’t go in the water? We carefully avoided going anywhere with golf – because you pay for that access, even if you don’t use it.
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I didn’t go. I did exciting things like dusting instead.
I used to love the neighborhood pool on post. One summer we went every clear evening and the pool would be warm and the pool would be shaded. Good times. I sure hope you get use of yours soon!
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Next week – starting tomorrow! Air quality is supposed to be good enough, and I can’t wait for my two time slots, Tuesday and Friday morning for a half hour.
NOT good, but FAR better than nothing.
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AH, pigeons! I’m having the exact same problem. For the first time in the years I’ve lived in my building they are suddenly all over everyone’s balconies, both this building and the one across the way. They especially like my balcony because it’s partly sheltered but they even built a nest on someone else’s because she was overseas and her apartment was unoccupied. And you know that pigeons are famous for always coming back. I can’t STAND the cooing; it’s like being haunted by ghosts. I actually have two friends coming over tomorrow to help me hang a large sheet of netting to close off my balcony to them.
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Our balcony had the most minimal of shelters – I would never have picked it over, say, a tree.
I was afraid of the always coming back part – I’m really not ever going to be set up for wildlife on the balcony, as the cleaning ladies have a hard enough time sweeping up pigeon poop and cobwebs. I’ll have to think about that before I put plants out.
The netting would work – people here have them – but I’m loathe to limit my view any more than it already is.
The cooing seems anti-evolutionary – what do they do when there are predators?
There is an internal logic to most things that exist – but you’d think being constantly noisy would have been bred out of them by now.
Good to see you – I’ve missed your posts. Hope the writing is coming well; if not, then the other things you were catching up on.
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I wonder if one of those plastic owls on your patio would keep the pigeons away. I’ve even seen battery-powered plastic owls that move.
I have never tried one of those fake owls, but I do hang (using old shoelaces that broke. It was a good thing I saved them) bright CD disks from the fruit trees in my back yard and since I started doing that I might lose one or two pieces of fruit instead of the entire crop. The wind turns the CD disks sending out flashes of rainbow-colored light and that seems to scare and keep the birds away.
Since hanging those CD’s on the fruit trees, I have more fruit than I can consume. Before I started using them, the birds got all of my fruit and I don’t remember getting one.
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Remember when those were ubiquitous?
I have a thing which flashes and rotates with the slightest wind. I may have to put a couple more out – but they will have to stay out of my peripheral vision as well, or I will be distracted by Shiny!
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