(no subject)

As the clouds grow dense, the moon fades, then vanishes, and its dispersed glow fills the air in which thin fog is gathering. Each hour is dimmer, except westward, where the lights of the town create a luminous, reddish dome. Eventually, mist forms and falls, slowly blackening the gray street. Though the air here is still, I hear distant pines moan, and know that the canyons have filled with wind. I wait, hoping the fog will thicken and shroud the woods and hide the dim shapes of the houses; or that the mist will quicken and accumulate on the trees and begin to drip, filling the night with soft drumming. But everything remains the same, an hour of vague vapor and tiny, chill droplets of mist that fall soundlessly. Maybe later in the season there will be foggy nights and more robust mists. It would be nice to have at least one such night while the air is still as mild as it now is, though. Fog and mist are best when the fewest layers of clothing separate them from the skin.

---

This is a bit creepy: Is your laser printer ratting you out? I am resigned to the fact that my online activities can be tracked, and that my hard drive is full of information about me, accessible to any snoop, public or private, clever enough to find it. But one does not think of a printer as being that sort of machine-- a rat, I mean. Computers are rats, of course, especially when the popular rat operating system is installed on them, but printers are the sort of thing one can imagine Ben Franklin using. Despite being a digital technology they hark back to the eighteenth century. It's just a bit disturbing to think that they can deliberately be designed to rat out their users. I know that typewriters can be traced, but that involves hunting down the particular machine that was used to type a particular page. The typewriter admits to having typed something, but doesn't blurt out its address. Easily traced printers that (in essence) put their address, and a hidden time and date stamp, on every document they produce are something quite different. That printer manufacturers and the government made a secret deal to do this is most distressing. Maybe I'll stick to ink jets.

Gray

It remained overcast most of the day, and I almost expected unexpected rain to fall, but the delightfully sombre mood was broken an hour before sunset, when the western clouds dissolved and gave passage to brilliant sunlight. I sneezed. Squirrels were out in great numbers all afternoon, running up and down the increasingly exposed branches of oak trees. There were also many acorn woodpeckers about, and at times their chatter was loud enough to rouse my lazy cat, who would give them the stink-eye before returning to her prolonged nap. She finally went out for a while at dusk, then had a snack and has now gone back to sleep. She's already slipping into her winter pattern. I wouldn't mind falling into that pattern myself, but there is too much needing to be done-- increasing numbers of leaves to be raked, for example, before the lawn dies from having its sunlight cut off. One would expect the bracing seasonal chill to energize me, but so far its mostly just making me want to curl up in front of a fire and doze.

In the news:

Hang down your head, Tom De-Lay,
Hang down your head and cry.
Hang down your head, Tom De-Lay,
Poor boy, you're bound to lie.