By Charles Wright
No wind-sighs. And rain-splatter heaves up over the mountains,
and dies out.
October humidity
Like a heart-red tower light,
now bright, now not so bright.
Autumn night at the end of the world.
In its innermost corridors,
all damp and all light are gone, and love, too.
Amber does not remember the pine.
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Perkypaduan and I originally had plans today, but she got an early start so she could go home and review while I got a late start because of a seasonal migraine, so we postponed and I spent a lot of the day lying around reading (Peter Watson's Landscape of Lies, not a great thriller and not great on the religious history/philosophy, but has lots of descriptions of less-known Tudor-era sites in Britain, which makes it worth reading). I also read lots of articles about the economic crisis; John McCain deciding that appearing on the news was more important than keeping his commitment to David Letterman, preparing to debate Barack Obama, or sitting down with the Democrats who were actually hammering out a bailout plan; the Ramses II temple discovered in Cairo; the mysterious "dark flow" discovered in space; lots of stuff in the new Astronomy magazine, including a new plutoid named for a Polynesian god; and the man charged with assault for farting near a cop.
Tropical Storm Hanna blew through the DC area with lots of flooding and damaged the C&O Canal towpath below Great Falls, which then caused the draining of the upper locks.
This is the sight that greets visitors at the Maryland side of Great Falls National Park: a nearly empty canal.
The canal packet boat Charles F. Mercer is already up on its winter blocks and will probably stay there all of next summer while the canal walls are repaired.
The mules who usually pull the boat through the locks were having a bit of a vacation.
I did wonder whether they would still be in shape to pull the canal barge after a summer of eating and lounging in the sun!
Usually we see turtles like these in the canal right near the walkway to Olmsted Island, but last weekend they were half a mile further down.
There won't be any turtles near Lock 18 this fall.
And human pedestrians, bikers and riders are warned away by signs like these.
Watched Smallville, which I'm quite enjoying this season, though not for the reasons I've liked the show before -- at the moment it's largely that there are three smart lead female characters while the two perpetual sniveling damsels are gone, and Chloe and Lois are finally, finally getting their due. I'm enjoying Tess enough that I'm not even missing Lionel or Lex all that much -- Lionel had fantastic chemistry with everyone, but they rewrote his backstory and the Veritas stuff so many times that it got ridiculous, while they made Lex so evil that it got impossible to care about him as a character. And it's such a relief not to have Lana or Kara around! Even the villain of the week is a stronger character than Lana...if only she'd had a sense of humor, or the actress had had a sense of comic timing, but we had to sit through six years of treacly badly-written Clark/Lana sop.
This week's meteor freak -- a messed-up teenage girl with an annoying voice -- is a more interesting female character than Lana Lang. As for Tess, I found her damsel-in-distress turned boss-from-hell turn rather amusing. And I love Lois and Clark together, not necessarily romantically; I like the flirtatious banter, the sexual tension, the triangle with Oliver, particularly the fact that he neither expects her to change for him nor really wants her to. And by the way, I don't like Supernatural and I never watch beyond the first five minutes, but I love the classic rock songvids that start every episode. I always leave those on.
Friday is Daniel's 15th birthday. How did that happen?! I am supposed to have lunch with a friend from high school and write a review of the Star Trek episode I watched earlier, but right now I need to go catch a huge camel cricket in the basement that has Daisy very upset.
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