Watching

Thursday night was chilly enough to warrant wearing a jacket, but I chose not to. I wanted to enjoy the cold unencumbered. There will be plenty of nights for bundling up, but for now it's good to shiver a bit, after enduring all those sultry months. I spent some time watching Orion track the moon, knowing that he was slowly gaining on it. I expected to see him closing in on it tonight. He probably is, but I can't see him. He is concealed among clouds made iridescent by the moonlight. It has gotten slightly warmer tonight, too, going from jacket weather to mere sweater weather. I'm not disappointed, as this has made cloud watching more pleasant. There have been marvelous shapes, some like lines of rolling silver breakers crashing on a dark beach, some like flocks of sheep following the shepherd moon, still others like continental masses strewn with dark lakes in which stars shone like the lights of fabulous water-borne cities. It was the best night sky in months.

Soon it will all change, of course. Already, I see the eastern horizon turning pale. The sun will transform the mysterious celestial world back into tethered clouds floating in Earth's blue sky, or even make it evaporate, leaving itself alone to rule the void. I will not see it. I will sleep, and dream of the clouds.

(no subject)

Every once in a while, I'll have a recrudescence of my childhood desire to be an architect. I begin sketching floor plans and imagining how the furniture will fit and what the elevations will look like and what clever little features I might work into the plan. It's kind of like having recurring bouts of shingles because you had chicken pox when you were a kid. It flares up all of a sudden, and you just have to let it run its course.

I blame this particular flare up of the architect disease on Comcast cable. They added all those channels such as Home and Garden and The Learning Channel and Discovery Home to our basic service, and now I'm watching them all the time. I know that when one watches these shows, one is supposed to be inspired to fix up their own actual house, but my DIY skills are of the sort that lead to the de-valuing of property, after a few side trips to the emergency room and, perhaps, a visit or two from the fire department. The further sad truth is that my architect skills probably aren't much better, but, as I said, I caught a disease when I was very young. I can't help it!

The end result is that too much of my time is going into designing or fixing up imaginary houses, so I'm getting less and less done in the real world. Having architect disease is worse than having access to the Internet, I tell you! I think I'm going to have to quit the DIY shows cold turkey. I'm never going to be Sparky Bartolomeo. Hell, I was ten before I found out there was a difference between a cross-cut saw and a rip saw! The world is so lucky I didn't become an architect. Had I done so, the landscape would be littered with my collapsed buildings. Yes, we're all better off if I keep my plans in the virtual world. But I'd be better off if I gave those plans a miss altogether. It would leave me more time for downloading porn updating my journal.