What's not to love about unions

I am in a union.  I am glad I am.  There is much to be said for banding together to get a fair deal.  But then there is the outer reaches, like arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin.  A coffee was spilled in the public area.  Protocol requires me to call the main office - in another building- so someone else can fill out a form and send it to the correct department so they can send a message to the correct clean up person who can then come in and clean up the mess....What's not to love.

Connections

So, last week I read a mystery from one of my favourite authors, Carola Dunn.  I have read almost all of the Daisy Dalrymple series and so I was pleased to read one (or listen as is my wont) to an earlier one that I hadn't read before: The Case of the Murdered Muckraker.  In it I was introduced to a person I had never heard of: Bessie Colman.  And now today Google informs me it is the anniversary of Bessie's birth - not thank goodness her sad if spectacular death. Ever have that happen?  You learn something and up it pops again almost right away?

I wonder what I will see next week about Bass Reeves whom I ran across watching Timeless this week.

Modern Communication

I sit with my iPad open to the FaceTime connection to my brother, a view to his shirtfront as he unpacks his suitcase, holding my cordless, on speaker, in the other hand, while my mother speaks to him about the text messages she sent him about his safe arrival home from Christmas. Her first. I make faces at my small self, presented me by my iPad, upper left.

Digital, all fifteen pounds of it.

Getting a good workout today doing the new books.  The Digital Atlas of Traditional Agricultural Practices and Food Processing - in three weighty volumes has arrived on my desk.  Digital???  Ya, that was what I thought too.  But, as a book binder, I can say it is my kinda digital.  Like when I look out at a blue sky and the weather person announces it is cloudy - my kinda cloudy.  They are beautiful books, pages and pages of photographs on how it's done around the world.  A perfect reference in a digital world in need of manual override.

The Pokapocalypse

It started yesterday.  I biked onto campus as usual, enjoying the spread of trees, the breeze, the swing of the bike in the curves.  Then I spied them.  In small clusters, holding their phones, staring, eerily still.  The Poka-zombies. I am glad that the basement dwellers are coming out.  At least their flesh will get a little sunlight and their muscles some new stretches - walking. But I have never been as creeped out in the real world as I was by their near motionless presence.  There are fewer of them today and an only slightly infected friend has given me the behind the scenes tour of this three dimensional video game of the present.

But just now, a ray of light.  Young, carrying butterfly nets aloft, real children, sans phones or pokadevices,  running about the bowl capturing real insects in the discovery of the real world.  My heart slows down.  I can breath again.  The Infection will not cause permanent damage.

New books

On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors: Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, Web Search, and Other Situations when Close is Close Enough.  This, believe it or not has reached a second edition.  I would have thought one was enough.  It is by Mark S. Manse and I can say with surety, I don't much care about the horseshoes and the web searches, but I am darn well as close to a hand grenade as I ever hope to be - many many miles.

Today's count

January in the imaginary age of climate change.  Two boys (that's just what they are in their twenties) out in the bowl playing Frisbee- in their shirt sleeves.  Puddles and the wind ruffling them like little lakes. The rising walls of a great white castle.  Bucket after bucket of snow packed around and then the chinks between the smooth forms filled.  It is in my view now, alone after the completion of construction.  A good four feet high.  The last row of bucket shapes showing like crenelation around its top. My ornamental asparagus putting out more shoots, climbing the window under the sun which has finally cleared the tops of the buildings opposite. A sun that goes down, as well roll away from it, almost an hour later than it did a month ago at the solstice.  Winter: more and more light.

A.E. Matheson 2016