Nonsequitur = Oblivious

Today at work I observed a whole family of people entering my department with large bruises on their foreheads... or so it appeared to me. It struck me as very strange how an entire family could have similar bruises on all their foreheads. Were they all involved in some sort of weird accident or strange experiment? I mused over this for a good 10 minutes until the answer hit me while casually glancing at the calendar: Ash Wednesday. Wow, I felt stupid :-p

Just the other day I was chatting with someone about reading and discussed how I can't read more than a couple books at once because I can't keep up if I divide my energy in too many directions... and I immediately go break that rule; just barely finished Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (yet another controversial novel that I would heavily recommend), I'm in the middle of She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb (a spot-on recommendation by my dear sister, as always), and I am also taking in snippets of the '94 edition of Quaker Faith & Practice of the Yearly Meeting of British Friends lent to me by my local meeting. On top of all of that I am reading Time On Two Crosses: the Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin. All of them of course are excellent reads so far and I'm actually keeping up with each one despite my attentions being so spread out.

Scientific Discovery of The Decade

Profound epiphany of the evening:
When one is hiking back across town from a friend's house, late at night, in single digit temperatures, with a cheap alpaca scarf wrapped around one's face... the humidity from one's breath creates an olfactory sensation which is not unlike that of a freshly-bathed llama. For the uninitiated... a freshly-bathed llama smells slightly musky and slightly earthy at the same time... Just thought y'all would be incredibly enriched by the description of this experience, heee heee !! :-)

Ranid Posterior

I just got back from the longest cross-country ski trip I've taken in my life... I set out alone from the edge of town and traversed a total of about 10-12 miles round trip... it brought me into the next town over. Methinks I overdid it due to the fact that every muscle in my body now feels like it's made of red hot cement. Pictures of the excursion will be forthcoming, but I really don't have anything else to say or post right now, so amuse yourselves with this picture of a froggy butt that I took at work the other day (he was happily sitting, half-submerged, on the leaf of an aquatic plant in one of our aqua-terrariums).

Perched on the apse between the gaps...

...just an odd phrase that kept running through my head today, I don't know where it came from but it sounds like a line from some sort of existentialist poem.

Word of the day: parsimonious

Witty retort of the day:

I needed to walk to the grocery store for a few groceries after work today. We have a stray shopping cart from the local Wal-mart sitting in our parking lot. The night-time supervisor got wind of the fact that I was hoofing it and asked me if I would care to push it back to the Wal-mart, to which I said,"Now really, I have all these bags to carry and how do you think it would make me look to be pushing a shopping cart around town?" and one of my coworkers chimes in,"In this town completely normal!"

Literature and Banned Books

I finished reading The Color Purple and WOW, it was one of the better novels I've tackled this year... Now getting started on She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb (yet another wonderful book recommended by my dear sister). One interesting thing I've noted about my reading in the past year has been that many of my selections are on The American Library Association's list of most commonly challenged or banned books. I understand the reason why some of these books are frequently challenged, but some of them are at the least innocuous and at best many of them are exceptional literature. Like my sister I may not agree with some of the content in these books but I fully support one's right to read them if they choose. If you really delve into this issue and find out more concerning the entries on the banned/challenged book list (better yet, read them for yourself) you will note how many stories and tomes are considered to be subversive or dangerous (by a select few); having had formal complaints filed about them and sustained efforts to remove them from the shelves of our local libraries; all because someone disagrees with the theme or messages that they contain. It scares me how many people want a free country yet are unwilling to entertain the notion that consumption of literature and ideas, free of censorship, is part of that freedom. (I will note that I believe there are absolutes here... for example I would NOT advocate free access to things such as instructional manuals which detailed how to make psychotropic drugs or explosive substances from common household chemicals.)

Das Kompost Nazi

Some of my coworkers think that I'm a little weird (ok, probably very weird) partly because I encourage them to give me their orange & banana peels as well as apple cores and I routinely empty the coffee grounds from the break room coffee machine into a used container in my lunch box just so I can take all these things home and compost them instead of allowing them to end up in a landfill. I've even been known to pick fruit peelings off the top of the trash and bury them in the flowerbeds outside. During the warmer months, I also bury the expired fish from the aquarium department. It may seem eccentric and it has gotten a lot of strange looks from those driving by, but let me tell ya, my workplace's flowerbeds have never had such rich soil.

Mt. Ascutney Hike

I had my friend W down for the weekend and we both decided to take a hike up the Weathersfield Trail on Mt. Ascutney on Saturday. The hike was beautiful (if not a bit hazardous due to ice & bad traction in many places). Want a bit of an adventure??? Try hiking in 6-12 inches of fresh snow on a trail where some genius decided that the blazes should be WHITE!!! (I thought that blue was one of the most universal trail blaze colors???) We ended up having to pause every 50-100 feet in order to spot the next blaze... doing this against a backdrop of freshly fallen snow and searching for white blazes on trees which in some cases already had numerous whitish natural coloration from lichens & whatnot. It was a refreshing but slightly taxing hike... we never made it to the summit due to our slow rate of progress, it would likely have been nightfall by the time we made it back down. I don't mind getting lost in the woods in warmer weather (with camping gear in tow), but getting lost in the woods in sub-zero temperatures and with no appropriate overnight equipment is entirely a different matter.

A sampling of the terrain

White Blazes + White Trails = ???

A lovely natural ice sculpture in the 'Little' Cascade Falls Ravine

A perspective on the size of the ravine

W and I

My ever-so-delicious homemade soup, You are now pwned!!! I am teh soupmaster!!!

Harassing 'Spud', my roommate's cat (who is obviously so pleased to be lavished with such attention, hehee). Doesn't he look adorable in that silly sweater that she made him wear!!!?

Wacky Advertisement

I just got a good chuckle out of this advertisement. There's a marketing department somewhere who must be patting themselves on the back over this one.