Poem for Tuesday

Now Winter Nights Enlarge
By Thomas Campion

Now winter nights enlarge
  This number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
  Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
  And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
  With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
  Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
  Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
  With lovers' long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
  Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well:
  Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
  Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
  And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
  They shorten tedious nights.

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Home sick. Thought maybe the heat (on very high due to it being five degrees when I woke up) had dried out my throat, but no -- over the course of the day I got the feverish burning eyes, very sore throat, icky post-nasal feeling. Other than going to mom's for leftovers for dinner -- oh, and walking a quarter of a mile in the near-zero wind chill to pick up younger son from school -- I did not leave the house, and took two naps. Am cranky but also grateful that I did not have a job I had to be at, thus making the naps possible. And speaking of illness, led me to Gollum's diagnosis, which made me smile.

I also talked to , who is suffering much more than I am: she is having an angioplasty tomorrow. They have assured her that she will be home for Christmas but it has got to be the most depressing and scary and frustrating thing to be spending this week in a hospital, though she doesn't complain and is my role model in counting blessings. I didn't dare try to visit her, being sick myself. I must come up with some fantastic manner of entertainment to bestow upon her, since writing Lost fanfic is out. Is there some way we can all make her a big online card?


Meadowside Nature Center borders Rock Creek Park. Here's the view from one of the hiking trails.


A straw hut and canoe from the exhibit on local Native American culture. The canoe was made on the premises and we had seen it in several stages of being hollowed out and tested.


From the exhibit on Muncaster Mill, which used to stand very near the nature center on the creek. The nearest major road is named for the mill.


There was ice in the water, though it was in the 50s.

Gacked from , to go with the first officer quiz:


Leonard "Bones" McCoy
I'm a Doctor, Not a ____________! (Star Trek)
brought to you by Quizilla

A very blessed solstice and Yule to everyone. Comments are in original locked post here.