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We aren’t getting drones. We are seeing flyovers from the Royal Canadian Air Force and advance elements of the 38th wing of Canada geese. They make a delightful racket.
(Delightful because they just fly right by. Keep it moving, geese.)
That was Saturday. Saturday night, if you’ll excuse the quality of the shot, Santa came through the neighborhood.
They do that every year. Isn’t that charming?
Since it falls on Sunday this year, I’ll just go ahead and acknowledge the date today. Sixteen years ago, Sunday, this happened.
It took place right under this tree. That’s Our Tree, in Savannah. Every time we go there, we go back to the park and sit right there, beneath it’s beautiful branches.
(Click to embiggen.)
I hope Our Tree is having a season of it. I hope we go back soon, and the sun is warm, the breeze is a delight and the ground is dry enough to lay upon all day.
On the patio we have an open rectangle, a three sided affair of blocks that stack about hip high in a basic symmetrical design. Inside of that rectangle sits the grill, which we will use less and less as the nights turn colder. The grill is covered and, on especially windy days, I’ll sit a heavy wrought iron chair in front of it, and just on the edge of the cover, hoping to keep it in place.
The grill faces two tables, which always speak to the promise of gatherings and parties and loud and peaceful nights outside in the best of seasons. And beyond are peaceful views of the treelines, the neighbor’s roofs, and so on. On the other side of the grill is a vibrant mishmash of plants from all over. Not all of them are native, but everything seems to prosper here in the soil here, where the heavy land and the green sands meet.
I say that because, just beyond the treeline behind us, just atop this tiny little hill, those soil types come together, a clash and a marriage of ancient geological forces that seem frozen to our human conceptions of time, but are really just passing through and alongside one another over the course of the geological history of everything.
My agronomy professors would be pleased.
Unknown to all of that, and behind that grill, and atop those stones, is this little patch of moss.
I could clean that off. Maybe I should.
But the current thinking is that moss could have been a part of ancient ice ages, some 470 million years ago. It spread on land, the thinking goes, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, dissolved, formed and altered rocks, which released significant amounts of phosphorus and iron which ended up in the oceans, where it caused massive algal blooms, taking more CO2 from the atmosphere. Then it is a chain of consequences. Small organisms feeding on the nutrients, leaving large areas without oxygen, which caused a mass extinction of marine species, meanwhile the levels of CO2 dropped all over the world, allowing the formation of ice caps on the poles and a few weeks later, we showed up, quoting Descartes and watching Friends.
Moss has long had medicinal purposes around here. The indigenous people at various times used it for bedding, diapers, and first aid, like wound dressing. That was still done through World War I because the stuff can just absorb moisture like someone reading Descartes for the first time. In other times in other parts of the world, it was once a foodstuff. It still has commercial uses. Why would you want to remove something as important as all that?
Someone, and I’m not naming names, picked up a supply of paper products made by people determined to upset the paper product paradigm.
What’s with this wavy perforation pattern?
It apparently started last year and has just now found its way to us. It is an attempt to solve the top problem consumers have … the incomplete tear.
We’ve really stumbled upon a moment in human society here.
If you thought I would go back to Descartes, well, you were right. But he takes us a different way.
I did say that there was some difficulty in expelling from our belief everything we have previously accepted. One reason for this is that before we can decide to doubt, we need some reason for doubting; and that is why in my First Meditation I put forward the principal reasons for doubt. (Replies 5, appendix, AT 9a:204, CSM 2:270)
He makes it clear that we should not extend hyperbolic doubt to practical matters:
I made a very careful distinction between the conduct of life and the contemplation of the truth. As far as the conduct of life is concerned, I am very far from thinking that we should assent only to what is clearly perceived. … from time to time we will have to choose one of many alternatives about which we have no knowledge … (Replies 2, AT 7:149, CSM 2:106)
The man was a 17th century genius philosopher and mathematician. If you try to look up his thoughts on toilet paper … you’ll be disappointed. He also couldn’t handle criticism, and suggested some of his contemporaries work would be best left to the privy.
Less messy than the moss, one supposes.
Since I didn’t show them off on Monday, I have been ordered to make today’s post all about the cats. (They are taskmasters.)
Poseidon enjoyed Monday Night Football this week. His team won. He, of course, likes the cats.
He’s also starting to hoard the remote control a little too much. It’s just like they say, give a cat a nature channel, they lock out all the other channels and you can’t undo the changes.
Phoebe does not care. She’s watching actual nature in the backyard from the comfort of a cozy lap cuddle.
Or … staring at the floor … for some reason.
So, as you can see, the cats are doing great. What the cats aren’t doing is my work for me, so let me get back to that.
Whether you are ready for it or not, your work schedules always march on. For me, that means grades and feedback. Always grades and helpful feedback. In one class, the students are tasked with conducting an audit of a social media platform of their choice. Last night, a draft version of that audit was due. And so I am reading those, trying to offer some constructive criticism, and then catch errors, and then finding creative ways to point them out, but not obviously. (Catch your own errors. I’m grading you, not editing you.)
Next week the final audit is due, so this is timely. Not every professor in the world is timely with their feedback, but I make the effort. (For those eventual weeks when there’s too much going on, I can apologize and remind you that usually this is a 24- or 48-hour turnaround, but I have this other work of my own, you see…)
For that group, it is all coming to a conclusion next week. Their audit draft will be in their hands by Thursday. The final audit and their final exam are due by this time next week. Altogether, that’s 45 percent of the class.
Meanwhile, other students are plugging in another along with quizzes and discussions and slide decks and outlines …
So I’ll stay busy this week and next.
And also start mentally preparing classes for the spring term.
I should just stay in the yard.
What if I did my best thinking out there, but I’ve just not given it a chance? What is thinking, anyway? What is thought? Does it arrive fully formed? Or do you tease it out under the moonlight, while doing random quotidian chores and you aren’t even focused on the thing? And isn’t that just another version of something arriving, fully formed?
Oh, and here come the Canada geese. You will know them by their honking. There is a wildlife refugee over in the direction from whence they are flying. We’re just under the regular seasonal flight path here, so this flyover happens a lot this time of year. I wish I knew, for purposes of alternatively romanticizing their habits and scientifically considering dietary options, precisely where they are going. There’s a creek just a mile from here, as the geese fly, and maybe the dining there is good. Or maybe they are heading all the way out to the river, or some other slough.
I didn’t notice it until I opened the photo here, but if you look at the bottom right corner, there’s a branch of that distant oak in the background that perfectly traces the outline of the giant shrub in the foreground. That’s the sort of thing that would be too cute if you painted it, not worth the effort if you tried to compose the photo that way, but perfectly charming when it is an accident.
It’s like the branch of the tree is telling those geese, Thataway!
OK, back to grading.
