12/23/23

 Saturday, December 23, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:40.  Let Lilly out.  40°, high of 44°, cloudy damp day today w/ average humidity of 95%, Dense Fog Advisory until 11 a.m., wind is NNE at 3 mph, 1-5/10.  Sunrise at 7:21, sunset at 4:20, 8+59.  Today's daylight is 4 seconds longer than yesterday's!  Wepre on our way to the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice.

Treadmill; pain.  30.18 & 0.65 at 11 a.m., watched Thich Nhat Hanh: The Art of Mindful Living, Part 1.  I had considerable PFP afterward, hoping it's not caused by the treadmill exercise.  Also some transient leg and back pain on the treadmill.

I'm grateful for cameras, from my first, the Agfa 35mm SLR my Uncle Bud brought back from Germany after the Second World War to the one built into my iPhone12ProMax, which I use promiscuously.  I see a lovely leaf on the ground and I want a photo of it.  I see a handsome or stately or elegant tree and I want a photo of it.  I have more than 1,000 photos on my phone.  If I were more disciplined, I would organize them into discrete albums to make searching for individual photos easier.  I've started with an album of my drawings and paintings, but I should break that album into 2 albums, one for each genre.  I need a separate album for old photos of my birth family.  An album, or two, for trees and leaves, etc.

This morning's dense fog reminds me of another morning with dense fog, about 45 years ago.  I had been trying for some time to get a good photo of a beautiful crabapple tree in Lake Park, not with its gorgeous pink blossoms in the Spring but 'nude', before the leaves and blossoms came out.  But in each photo I took the shapes of the tree and its branches were compromised by the bushes and trees in the background.  I tried to blur the background clutter by setting the aperture of the lens at its widest opening, but still the background clutter ruined the photos.  One morning I was awakened early by the fog horn at the Lake Park lighthouse located down Newberry Boulevard from our house.  I thought "This is my chance," crawled out of bed, grabbed my camera bag, drove down to the park, walked to the little glade where the tree lived, lay down on my belly on the cold, wet ground of the downslope east of the tree, opened the aperture, and got my shot.  My wife probably thought I was nuts, but what a beautiful photo of a beautiful tree, with all the background clutter shrouded by the dense fog.  The photo hangs on the wall above the headboard of my bed, giving me pleasure every time I see it.

LTMW at the berry-laden tree along County Line Road, I see what I think is a flock of cedar waxwings.  I can't tell for sure in the fog and because of the distance, but their size and behavior clearly suggest cedar waxwings.

I'm thinking about 9/11 today and why Osama bin Laden and his band of followers hate(d) the U.S. and selected the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the Capitol as targets.  I recall all the TV networks and other news media asking 'Why do they hate us?' and we, the populace being so incredulous that anyone would hate our great democratic 'city on a hill,' which we are incllined to think of as an inspiration  and model  for all lesser nations.  I'm thinking of it as most of the rest of the world  reads and hears news of near famine in Gaza and disease spreading like wildfire, considers Israel to be engaging in illegal group punishment, sacrificing old men and women, mothers and children to satisfy a bloodlust of revenge for Hamas' attack on October 7th and sees the United States as the enabler of all the suffering, sees Biden and Neanyahu (the single biggest opponent of peace between Israelis and Palestinians for the last 40 years) literally embracing after the onslaught began, sees Secretaries Blinken and Austin uttering hollow platitudes about minimizing civilain casualties and respecting the rules of warfare, and sees the U.S. vetoing UN Security Council resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire.  Is it not almost guaranteed that there will be more global eanimus towards Israel, more anti-semitism, and more terrorists produced by Israel's war on Gaza than there was on October 6th?  Can it really be a big surprise that so many young Democrats are down on Biden.

Five Years Ago - a video that Andy and Anh set out of the kids - soo much younger - singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."