Fermilab's Analemmatic Sundial

There's a sundial on the grounds of the Lederman Science Center at Fermilab. Not a (literal) garden-variety sundial, but an analemmatic sundial, which in this case is a horseshoe-shaped structure large enough to stand on. When the sun is out, you stand in the right place on the structure and your shadow will point to one of a semicircle of stones in the ground, telling you (roughly) the non-daylight savings time hour.

The following is my shadow, pointing to the 3 pm stone -- the third stone to the right of a stone marked "12." I was there with Ann on the afternoon of March 24, 2012. According to the clock in my cell phone, the only timepiece I carry around, the time was 4 pm, but of course that was a daylight savings time reading. I was glad to see that the shadow of my head exactly touched the stone.

Ann is pictured here standing on one of the squares on top of the structure: same one that I did, MARCH. There are 12 squares. Each has the name of one of the months carved on it. Stand on the correct month and you'll get the correct hour, provided the sun in shinning and you account for the change in the clocks.

Waymarking tells me that the sundial is at N 41° 50.363 W 088° 16.013. The formal name of Fermilab is the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which is easy to visit if you happen to be in Batavia, Illinois. We didn't arrive in time to go inside the Lederman Science Center, but we did manage to see the sundial and a few other things, more about which tomorrow.

The Clock We Live On

I'm sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details -- Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. -- until I read The Clock We Live On.

When I was in San Antonio last year, I noticed this book off in some corner of my mother's house, its pages yellow and crumbling away. It's never good to throw away a book, but this one's time had come (note the tape; it had long been worn from use). Still, I remembered it so fondly that I saved the cover. The inside cover has an example of my father's handwriting, something I don't have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.

I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics -- why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.

Strangely enough, Ann brought home a book from the school library the other day: Venus: A Shrouded Mystery, by none other than Isaac Asimov. Late Asimov (1990) and a book for kids. But maybe that's not so strange. The man was a writing machine, even back in the days of typewriters, carbon copies and human typesetters, so probably a lot of his books are still stocking school libraries.

All Hallows' Inflatables

All Saints' Day turned out warmer than Halloween, even in the evening, with a touch of wind and a clear sky. Jupiter is riding high these evenings.

For years I never could remember which was All Saints' and which All Souls', even though I know All Hallows' Eve is the giveaway. Not that anyone asked or tested me on that; I just like to know my calendar. Anyway, all the saints come first. Of course they do. Hierarchy is hierarchy.

Never as common as Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations disappear a lot more quickly too. I took note of the remaining Halloween decorations when driving a few hours ago. Only handful of lights remain, plus a few glowing inflatables. Good riddance for most of those inflatables, I say. Really, what's the excuse for this?

Then again, Scooby and his pals do seem to run into fake ghouls with alarming regularity. Every day is Halloween for that crew.

Those Few, Those Happy Few

I suspect that today was the last warm day of 2011. Warm, windy, cloudy. I eked out a short while to sit on the deck and read.

I picked up Ann from her school this afternoon to take her to the dentist (no cavities, glad to report) and noticed that a white board in the school office said: Today is Denim Day. I don't think they meant this. Maybe it was this, but that's off a few weeks. I didn't ask the staff. Later, I asked Ann about it. She had no idea.

Never mind. It's St. Crispin's Day. I've posted about it before, but here's another rousing performance of the St. Crispin's Day speech, this one by a young Richard Burton.

The Least of Holidays

Leif Erikson Day has come and gone, and are we better for it? No, wait, that was Columbus Day (Observed). Lilly and Ann weren't in school yesterday, and we didn't get any mail. Except for those things, Columbus Day around here might as well be Leif Erikson Day.

The first U.S. president to proclaim a Columbus Day holiday was Benjamin Harrison, who did so for the 400th anniversary of the landing on San Salvador. Not, as you would think, on October 12, 1892, but instead on October 21, 1892. Columbus and his crew might have landed on October 12, but that was using the Julian calendar -- the Gregorian correction wasn't introduced to Catholic Europe until 1582, after all. In the 15th century, the difference between Julian and Gregorian would have been about nine days, so to be mathematically correct about the anniversary, you'd have to mark it on the 21st.

How learned of the Harrison administration. Or pedantic, take your pick.

The difference is still nine days, but clearly Congress wasn't interested in such subtleties when it created the federal holiday in 1937, so October 12 it is, at least until the holiday completely withers away, which we might live to see. But we still need some kind of holiday in October, to bridge Labor Day with Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Maybe Towel Day can be moved to October 12, since that's the anniversary of the publication of the first of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book in the series in 1979.

Wednesday Macédoine

Temperature when I got up this morning, just after sunrise: zero Fahrenheit. By midday, the air had warmed into the mid-20s F. Remarkable how pleasant that seemed by comparison.

The neighbors who put up an electric-light simplified Serbian flag last year for Christmas didn't do it again this year. For whatever reason, this year they were later in stringing lights -- last weekend -- and instead of a glowing Serbian flag, put up a string of blue icicle lights near their roof, plus blue lights in the shape of stylized Christmas trees closer to the ground. A nice effect.

We received another odd business-advertising 2011 calendar in the mail yesterday. A calendar after my own heart: this one includes more presidential birthdays than the standard Lincoln and Washington. But not all of the presidents. Chronologically through the year, these chief executives made the cut: Franklin Roosevelt; McKinley; Lincoln; Washington; Jackson; Madison; Jefferson; Grant; Kennedy; John Quincy Adams; Hoover; Benjamin Harrison; Eisenhower; Teddy Roosevelt; and Wilson.

Fifteen out of 43 (Cleveland counts only once for this purpose). I guess the calendar-maker didn't want to clutter it up with all the birthdays, but still -- Benjamin Harrison but not Cleveland? John Quincy Adams but not John Adams or James Monroe? Hoover but not Truman? And what about poor President Fillmore? He would have been first on the calendar (January 7) had he been included.

Our annual Think Geek catalog came recently as well. High amusement value, as always. This year I noticed an entire page devoted to The Big Bang Theory merchandise. The TV show, not the cosmological event. Maybe the page was there last year, but I hadn't seen the show then, so wouldn't have paid attention to its merchandise. Lately we've been working our way through TBBT DVDs, because the show has that certain something that most sitcoms lack. Namely, it's funny. Hard to believe that the same producers are responsible for the not funny Two and a Half Men, but the strength of TBBT seems to lie in its talented writers and cast, especially Jim Parsons, who's probably stuck with Sheldon Cooper for the rest of his career. These are examples from the first, second and third seasons.

I'd order a Periodic Table shower curtain if it weren't $30. It would have to sing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements," and maybe some other songs about elements, to be worth that much. That isn't far-fetched: you can buy a "personal soundtrack" t-shirt from the Think Geek catalog.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Today was nearly warmish, in the 50s F., unlike the deep chill blanketing Thanksgiving itself this year, so a thousand outdoor Christmas displays bloomed. Or so it seemed driving home after dark. It's probably an erroneous impression, but more wattage seems to be out there this year, at least in my neighborhood. If I drive through another couple of neighborhoods and get the same impression, that's enough material for a trend piece: Homes Lighting Up More in Hopes of Better '11. But I don't usually write that kind of article.

Not long ago I almost submitted this sentence for publication, regarding residential mortgage foreclosures and bunged up paperwork: "[Some] have suggested that the only relevant facts are that the borrower owes the money and has to pay it back," Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller... told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, stating what might be called the 'Milton Drysdale' mindset. AG Miller begged to differ."

But I changed it to "Montgomery Burns." For one thing (sigh) my editor might not have known who Mr. Drysdale is. But more importantly, I needed a touch of malice in the reference. Mr. Drysdale might have been Avarice incarnate, but otherwise didn't seem evil.

At its earliest, Thanksgiving can be on the 22nd; at its latest, the 28th. So Lilly's birthday won't ever fall on Thanksgiving, but it will always be pretty close. Her celebration was the weekend before the holiday this time around.

The day after Thanksgiving, I got a calendar in the mail from a Realtor I don't ever remember having any dealings with. It's a customized calendar advertising his services, of course, but I like his idiosyncratic choice of noteworthy days. In January, for example, there's the standard New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day and even Epiphany, but there's also "Save the Eagles Day" (January 10), "Amelia Earhart Day" (January 11) and "Christa McAuliffe Day" (January 28). I wonder about that last one. It's all very well to remember Christa McAuliffe, but six other crew members died that day too.

Also included -- besides a sizable assortment of secular, Christian, Jewish and Islamic holidays -- are Chinese New Year, Income Taxes Due, V-E Day, Atlantic Hurricane Season Begins (June 1), D-Day, Juneteenth, V-J Day, National Aviation Day (August 19), Women's Equality Day (August 26), Stepfamily Day (September 16), International Day of Peace (September 21), Native American Day (September 23), Mother-in-Law Day (October 23) Wright Brothers Day (December 17) and Forefather's Day (December 21). I sense that this fellow might be a pilot, besides selling real estate.

Views From the Hubble Telescope

Late January is just the right time to buy a new calendar, I figure. The discount is steep but you still have a little more than eleven months' usage of the thing. I had that in mind on Saturday before noon when I found myself at a calendar kiosk at the Woodfield Mall.

I needed a calendar for my little office at home. Each calendar at the kiosk was $4, which is a next-stop-landfill price. The one I finally bought has a MSRP of $13.99/Can$16.99/£9.99, including VAT for that last one. Seems like the Canadians are getting the short end of that stick; I did a quick conversion at the useful XE.com and the loonie is stronger than that ($13.99 = Can$14.80).

Lots of calendars were on the racks, but few showed much imagination. The usual suspects include dogs, cats, lighthouses, sports stars, young women in small swimsuits, celebrities du jour, classic cars, and so on. Tucked away toward the bottom of one rack was "Space: Views from the Hubble Telescope," published by Pomegranate Communications of Petaluma, Calif., and Scientific American. That looked promising.

So promising that I now have it on my wall. The photos are as picturesque as you'd expect, clear and colorful shots of impossibly distant places with hybrid poetic-catalog names: Spiral Galaxy M71, Giant Nebula NGC 3603, Galaxy Cluster Abell S0740, just to name three illustrations .

Even better, there's more than the run-of-the-mill text on the calendar itself. U.S., U.K. and Canadian holidays are all represented, as well as the phases of the moon and the solstices and equinoxes, but so are birthdays and death anniversaries of an assortment of astronauts, astronomers, cosmologists and others.

The anniversary of certain launches toward space or encounters with other worlds are noted too -- and not just the ones you might think. Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket launch on April 16, 1926 rates a mention; so does Valentina Tereshkova's ride into space on June 16, 1963; and so does the French launch of its first satellite on November 26, 1963, the A-1 Astérix. And what was the next French launch? The Obelix?

The 20th anniversary of the launching of the Hubble telescope is duly noted on April 24. That also happens to be the day in 1970 that China -- Red China in those days -- launched its first satellite, Dongfanghong I, which transmitted the song of that name -- "The East is Red," to give its English title. Those were the days. Nowadays Chinese satellites probably transmit newer songs, such as "The East Has a Trade Surplus."

The Years to Come

Classic November day of the non-drizzle variety -- gray skies throughout the day, cold but not quite freezing, occasional flights of geese making their way wherever it is geese go. The year's nearly gone and good riddance. The decade's nearly gone too, come to think of it, but it hardly seems worthy of the name. Back in the 20th century we had real decades, by gar.

Heard a discussion on the radio today about whether next year will be "Two Thousand Ten" or "Twenty Ten." Since it was NPR, they went to considerable lengths to quote people supporting both stylings, along with various arguments supporting their choices, some more ridiculous than others. Go with your ear, I say. "Two Thousand Ten" for me.

At some point in the next ten years, however, the year will shift to a "Twenty-" format, since 2020 is already called "Twenty Twenty." As the first one to end with "-teen," I suspect 2013 might be the dividing year, but it could also be 2012, since "Twenty Twelve" is fairly euphonious. Then again, the special-effects show in theaters now seems to be calling it "Two Thousand Twelve."

The first decades of the 20th century are little guide, aside from the fact that most of the people who lived through it are gone. "Nineteen" applied to each of the years from the beginning. That reminds me of Mr. Allen, my eighth-grade English teacher, one of whose pet peeves was "Nineteen Oh-One" and the like. He insisted it be pronounced "Nineteen One." His reasoning: "Oh is not a number." I'm pretty sure that in the more than 35 years since he told us that, almost everyone in the class has ignored him on that point. I know I have.

Earth Day, Arbor Day, Greenery Day

As if on cue, the rain stopped, the air got warmer and the Sun emerged from its undisclosed location. Spring is back after getting mugged for a few days by rearguard elements of Winter.

After whatever Earth Day inculcation kindergarten class offered to Ann this morning, she came out of school in a mood to pick up trash on the way home. In the park next to the school, that meant depositing a few items in brown trash barrels. Along the path toward home, where there are no barrels, that meant giving bits of trash to Dad for him to carry home to add to the solid-waste stream. "If we don't pick up the trash, the Earth will get tired," she said.

When I was her age, Earth Day hadn't been invented yet. I can't say that I remember the first one in 1970, being not quite nine at the time, though I remember very well the Apollo 13 drama, which happened the week before. In later years, I vaguely remember hearing about the occasion. But there was no pedagogues pushing the idea, no Google to change its logo for the day and not much merchandising of the day, not even by Disney.

Arbor Day must be jealous. Can't say that I paid much attention to Arbor Day growing up, either, being unaware that it's the last Friday of April in Texas. It's also the last Friday in April in Illinois, which is this Friday. To celebrate, crews from the village came to my neighborhood today and cut down a tree across the street from my next-door neighbor, which mostly involved a man in a bright yellow cherry-picker cutting with a power saw and two guys feeding the ever-larger cut pieces into a Morbark wood chipper, the kind of evil-sounding device that Bond villains probably feed their enemies to. Maybe not that evil, but it sure was noisy. Even retreating to the deck on the other side of the house for a little while didn't help me get away from the noise.

Japan has an Arbor Day of sorts: Greenery Day, one of a string of holidays that make up Golden Week. Greenery Day, however, was a late invention. Before his return to the realm of the kami, the Emperor Shōwa's birthday -- April 29 -- was a holiday. After he died in 1989, the holiday was retained but called "Greenery Day."

When I lived there I saw it on calendars but otherwise never heard much about it, except that it was the first day of Golden Week. Lately, I understand, Greenery Day has been moved to May 4, which used to be a nonspecific ponte holiday between May 3 (Constitution Memorial Day, honoring the MacArthur document, not the Prussian-flavored Meiji constitution) and May 5 (Children's Day, formerly Boys' Day). April 29 is now Shōwa Day, but it still kicks off Golden Week -- a bad time to travel in Japan, which becomes something like spring break in Disneyworld in terms of crowding.

Spring is Here, Have Some Canned Chili

All the usual media outlets will call March 20 the "first day of spring," but around here we've sunk back into late winter. Not sure why the equinox has become conflated with a precise beginning of something that has no such precision, but maybe it's because describing the mechanics of the apparent path of the Sun as it crosses the Celestial Equator twice a year is too complicated for TV.

Not sure if this is a sign of spring or not: down the street from us, someone left a banana peel on the sidewalk. Still fairly yellow, just sitting there, waiting to make some low comedy. Maybe somewhere nearby is a webcam feeding into a website called sliponabananapeel.com. Or maybe not. Google returns just one hit for sliponabananapeel.com, an entry on a Delta Air Lines blog (?).

Recession Food: A 15-oz. can of Range Master Chili, no beans, bought recently at Aldi for 59¢ (a serious discount even for Aldi), and eaten even more recently. I can't say it was terrific. No canned chili is terrific, except for Wolf Brand, and that only because of its commercials. But Range Master had an OK flavor, and it didn't make me sick. That's pretty much all I ask from canned chili.

Nothing too unusual in the ingredients: water, beef, modified food starch, tomatoes, chili powder, textured vegetable protein, oatmeal, salt, sugar... oatmeal? For texture, maybe, in case the vegetable protein didn't provide enough. Second-to-last is autolyzed yeast, a term that I had to look up. For a food technology term, it's pretty cool. From wisegeek.com: "The interaction between salt and live yeast creates a chemical process called autolysis. Autolysis is essentially the self-destruction or self-digestion of an organism by its own enzymes. Salt does not 'kill' yeast as much as it causes the live yeast's digestive enzymes to eat themselves. The result is an inactive yeast with a different concentration of proteins."

The Deeds of St. Patrick

It was genuinely warm today, not warm for two hours in the afternoon, but warm from mid-morning to past sunset. Our thermostat sat on its metaphorical hands all day, ready to command the heater to fire itself up, but it never came to pass. Outside, a bug landed on a book I was carrying, and I swore I saw a small cloud of gnats at one point. Maybe that was a spring-onset illusion.

But that's all we get for a while. One warm day.

I walked about a mile through the neighborhood in late afternoon, enjoying my coatlessness and taking note of all the Irish-themed decor. Not all that much, actually. Some cheap cardboard shamrocks, a stock image of a leprechaun painted on a beaten-up wood panel, and a sign or two in some windows.

Someone had scrawled "Happy St. Patrick's Day" on the sidewalk in white chalk, and there was a genuine Irish tricolor flying at one house -- the first time I'd ever seen that flag flown for the occasion, except at the downtown Chicago March 17 parades I used to attend because they were near my office.

As I've said before, St. Patrick's day is fine. But I have a quixotic desire to see a St. David of Wales (March 1), St. George of England (April 23) and St. Andrew of Scotland (November 30) also celebrated in non-saintly ways here in the New World. But maybe they didn't catch on because their miracles weren't as awesome (in the old sense) as those of St. Patrick, who besides chasing the snakes out of the Ireland also turned water into Guinness.

Mud Season is Here

Leap Day and then the first day of meteorological spring passed without too much trouble, and in fact things warmed up some during the day on March 1, with large puddles then refreezing for dramatic effect by night. Today, Texas Independence Day, was a lot warmer, maybe 50° F, and even now it's well above freezing. Large patches of ground will be visible tomorrow, and there might be rain. Mud season is here.

Letters from Iwo Jima came in the mail on the heels of Flags of Our Fathers, so we watched that on Saturday. Structurally it was a better movie, and interesting for portraying the other side of the battle. There were some stretchers, though, such as having Baron Nishi read a letter -- out loud and in Japanese for his men to hear, one that he found on an American who was captured but then died of his wounds -- a letter that happened to be from the boy's mother. Demonstrating to his men that even Americans had mothers who cared for them. It was a Hollywood moment.

After those two movies, I needed something lighter, and chanced on a showing of Airplane! on TV this afternoon. Just the thing. I saw it when it was new, in a movie theater -- I was 19 -- and again on tape 15 years ago or so. It holds remarkably well as a one-gag-after-another movie, or for any movie made in 1980 that matter. By "holding up," that is, it still made me laugh, and Lilly got a kick out of it too, though of course a good number of the jokes were beyond her.

But not running ones like this:

Rumack: (To Elaine) You'd better tell the captain we've got to land as soon as possible, we've got to get them to the hospital...

Elaine: A hospital -- what is it?

Rumack: It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now. Tell the captain I must speak to him.

Raggedy Ann & Beloved Belindy

Main Street in Arcola, Illinois, has one distinction that no main street anywhere else has, namely the Johnny Gruelle Raggedy Ann and Andy Museum. I'd probably read about the place sometime before we got to Arcola, but Raggedy Ann and Andy had made such a slight impression on me throughout my 45+ years that I anything I knew previously about the museum must have evaporated. So I was surprised to see it.



Not only that, I went in with some trepidation. Here's another rinky-dink museum that wants to gouge me for admission. I was fully expecting them to ask $5 or more -- museum admission inflation has gotten pretty bad in recent years. If it had been that much, I would have sent Yuriko and the kids in to look around, while I took a walk around Arcola.

Admission was only $1 each -- and nothing for Ann. At that price, I decided to look around. It turned out to be a small, thoughtfully designed museum not only about the dolls, but about their creator, the cartoonist John Gruelle, who grew up in Arcola. Previously I knew nothing about him and his creations, and now I know something. I'd say the museum did its job.

As you'd expect, it had a large collection of Raggedy Anns, but it had other, more interesting (to me) items, including an astonishing array of Raggedy Ann merchandise from across the decades. Gruelle drew political cartoons, and there were some of those; he illustrated children's books not his own, and there were some of those as well; and there were other characters he'd created, both as drawings and dolls that never achieved the level of fame that Raggedy Ann did. The most intriguing of these was Beloved Belindy, Raggedy Ann and Andy's mammy. I figure most people wouldn't know there was ever such a character. I certainly didn't.

Then again, as a former boy, Raggedy and her kin had little appeal for me. But wall of a magazine covers and various illustrations from the 1920s to the 2000s showed just how enduring the doll's appeal is -- hanging there were dozens of uses of Raggedy Ann in illustrations and photographs, mainly using the doll as a shorthand for the innocence of childhood or girlhood. In one, a Christmastime 1961 or '62 magazine cover by Norman Rockwell, a traditional Santa -- as you'd imagine he'd be in a Rockwell painting -- is wearing a Mercury astronaut space helmet. One of the toys he's carrying is a Raggedy Ann.

We Like Sundays

The visit by the Jehovah’s Witnesses this week reminded me of the time that a husband-and-wife team, or at least a man-and-woman team of Korean sectarians buttonholed us during a visit to the Woodfield Mall earlier this year. I don’t recall the name of their group, though I suspect it was a homegrown Korean Protestant church. All I wanted to do was sit one of the mall’s benches and eat the pastries we’d just bought, but they wanted to talk about a particular religious bee in their bonnet, and it wasn’t evolution.

No, they were sabbatarians, out to persuade us of the error of reserving Sunday for Christian worship. Sunday as the Lord’s Day, they said, was a grievous mistake, a day invented by (variously as the conversation continued) men, Romans or pagans, or at least borrowed from pagans. That line of disparagement doesn’t go very far with someone like me, who holds ancient Rome in such high esteem.

So I asked him: Wasn’t Sunday as the Lord’s Day well established by the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325? If it were wrong why didn’t they change it then? He went on some more about the Lord’s Day being a human, as opposed to divine creation, but I think the mention of the Council of Nicaea there in the mall threw him off a little. At one point I added, “If Sunday’s good enough for Constantine, it’s good enough for me.” He looked at me funny for a moment, but didn’t really acknowledge that idea.

Later, they left us with some sabbatarian tracts, and at his insistence I left him with my phone number. Oops, I got a few digits wrong.

Item from the Past: Columbus Day, 2000

A note from when Lilly was about the same age as Ann is now.

Today, actual Columbus Day, I went at work, though I had Monday off. That happened to be federal Columbus Day, as well as Yom Kippur, and “Canadian Thanksgiving.” That’s what the calendar says, anyway. Perhaps the very first Jewish-Italian-Canadian holiday. I’m for any holiday that lets me sleep late.

Speaking of Canada, the Sun-Times, which features an amusing column called Quick Takes (a sort of mild News of the Weird) ran this about the recent death of PM Trudeau: “News Item: ‘MONTREAL — Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a flamboyant and charismatic giant who led the country through some of its most tumultuous events…’ Name one.”

On Sunday we repaired to the Illinois Railroad Museum in Union, Illinois, just far enough northwest of the Chicago conurbation to maintain cornfields. We had been to the IRR Museum before, in 1997, in the summer before Lilly was born. We decided then that by a certain age, the child would probably enjoy an outing to this place, which sports many old railroad cars of all descriptions and conditions.

Recently, it occurred to us that Lilly was ready for it. “Choo-choo train” was an early word of hers, and she’s fond of watching them go by. Since the museum closes for the season at the end of October, and since I didn’t have to work on Monday, we decided that last weekend was the weekend for it. On Sundays, also, the museum runs some of the engines plus passenger cars on the few miles of track that it owns, one of which snakes out between farms and next to nameless tiny tributaries of the Mississippi. It was a good visit, though cold and windy that day — about 40-45° F, the coldest it has been during the day in many months (yesterday it was in the 60s and maybe even 70, and it’s still pleasant today). We rode two of the trains and when into several train sheds and looked at the rows of engines and other cars, climbing into some. We were correct, the time had come for Lilly to enjoy it; she did, in her toddler way.

High Summer

A mark of high summer—fireflies. I saw some thing evening, along with a perfectly pleasant sunset late in the evening. Lilly says she’s seen some already, but I missed them until today.

The last day of June: half a year gone. It should be a holiday, along with Juneteenth (the 19th), the Solstice, and July 4. We could string them all together for something like the week between Christmas and New Year’s: a national slowdown, but in summer instead of winter. I can dream, can’t I?

I can also take a few days off from posting. I’ll pick it up again around July 5.