The sun is searching for a place to stay

[sovay]

We are estimated to receive a foot of snow in the year's first winter storm, which is busily plastering over our windows as municipal snowplows bang in the street outside. I can't tell yet if staying inside for snow feels altered by this year of staying inside for plague, nine months now and no nice due date to point to. Lately I have been falling asleep in the evenings and waking after midnight when I would prefer to be winding down to sleep. Tomorrow I have to call the kind of bureaucracy that's trying to kill me, not the much rarer kind that I was so pleasantly surprised to deal with last week. I couldn't catch the real sodium-pinpointed wind-blue of the air no matter how I tried, but I liked watching the white sand of the snow blow past our back deck.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Then I wish you luck with all of that!

And is indeed a very wintry photograph.

[sovay]

Then I wish you luck with all of that!

Thank you!

And is indeed a very wintry photograph.

The snow is still piling up!

[nodrog]

I have a horror of the White Death, the freezing starving Fimbulwinter, that absolutely precludes any such “enjoyment” of what is genuinely trying to kill me.

Sorry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Fimbulwinter

[nodrog]

… A meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd…

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths…

Lord Byron, “Darkness”

[sovay]

I have a horror of the White Death, the freezing starving Fimbulwinter, that absolutely precludes any such “enjoyment” of what is genuinely trying to kill me.

I love winter, I'm afraid, almost as much as I love autumn, but I can do you a Ragnarök.

[selkie]

a) I always place this in your body of work far earlier than 2015; clearly I need a temporal re-pinning of the map

b) Is this the first arch of your glorious, intricate chancel screen of ...maybe don't fuck that person/entity/harbinger ?

[sovay]

a) I always place this in your body of work far earlier than 2015; clearly I need a temporal re-pinning of the map

It was written in 2010 and originally published in 2011 in Not One of Us! Your temporal sense is, in this case, spot-on. It's just been reprinted twice since then.

b) Is this the first arch of your glorious, intricate chancel screen of ...maybe don't fuck that person/entity/harbinger?

It may be an early finial or something, yes.

[davidgillon]

Lately I have been falling asleep in the evenings and waking after midnight when I would prefer to be winding down to sleep.

I've been doing precisely the same, it makes for a peculiar daily cycle.

Tomorrow I have to call the kind of bureaucracy that's trying to kill me

Sending strength and hugs

[sovay]

I've been doing precisely the same, it makes for a peculiar daily cycle.

I really don't like it. I was awake for two days straight last week based on pain and that didn't help at all.

Sending strength and hugs

*hugs*

I returned with the head of one bureaucracy! Now I have to wrangle another!

[davidgillon]

I really don't like it.

I have mixed feelings, it seems to be the one pattern of mine where I regularly fall asleep without issue. I just wish it would come with more than five minutes notice that I'm about to fall asleep.

I returned with the head of one bureaucracy!

Home is the huntress! I recommend shrinking it and mounting in a Newton's Cradle (idea stolen from Charles Stross's The Laundry Files)

[selkie]

Good fuckety, it’s daylight again. Which implies a triumph and a kick in the back at the same time.

*hugs*

[sovay]

Good fuckety, it’s daylight again. Which implies a triumph and a kick in the back at the same time.

The important thing is that we keep being here to see it.

*hugs*

[asakiyume]

May you triumph over the bureaucratic killers.

I am about to** venture into that sandy snow to see how our driveway looks.

**in a manner of speaking ... I still have to get dressed.

[sovay]

May you triumph over the bureaucratic killers.

Thank you! It seems that "turn it off, kick it a couple of times, turn it back on" works on government websites, which is horrifying.

(How does your driveway look?)

[asakiyume]

Remarkable story--I was struggling with the snowplow berm, and young guy came down the road pushing a running snowblower.

"I just need to put more gas in this, and then I could clear that for you," he offered.

"Thank you very much, that would be wonderful!" I said.

He was out of gas because he'd been clearing snow from that paths across the common areas in the development.

[sovay]

He was out of gas because he'd been clearing snow from that paths across the common areas in the development.

That's nice!

[asakiyume]

And yes, that is an alarming way to have websites--or bureaucracies--function.

'Sonic Seasonings.'

[nodrog]

I am delighted to be able to offer you a Yuletide gift that wasn't available before:  Wendy Carlos' groundbreaking ambient tone poem album,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Seasonings

'Sonic Seasonings.'  This was It before 'It' was - the founding of the genre.  Each of the four seasons is depicted aurally, with natural and synthesized sound:  Summer is insect-droning heat, Autumn is melancholy, crackling campfire and ocean surf - 'Nobody on the beach / The Sun goes down alone' - and… at 1:05:15 - Winter.  Now, with your storm going on, now is the time to put on headphones (and a blanket!) and listen.

Sonic Seasonings

https://vimeo.com/428929978

Re: 'Sonic Seasonings.'

[sovay]

I am delighted to be able to offer you a Yuletide gift that wasn't available before: Wendy Carlos' groundbreaking ambient tone poem album

Thank you! I have actually not heard that.

Re: 'Sonic Seasonings.'

[nodrog]

At the crescendo, when the wolves howl - yah, I'll be in my geothermally heated cave with the entrance bricked up, thank 'ee.  Pemmican, jerky & bean sprouts, and the Five-Foot Shelf of Books in here, freezing death out there.

[ashlyme]

A wonderful picture. I can almost feel the quiet that comes with snow.

Good luck for wrestling with bureaucrats today.

[sovay]

A wonderful picture. I can almost feel the quiet that comes with snow.

It drifted beautifully over all the rails.

Good luck for wrestling with bureaucrats today.

Thank you! So far, success. *apotropaic charms everywhere*

[ashlyme]

*So far, success.*

*Inspector Gadget fistbumps* Is it still snowing?

[sovay]

Is it still snowing?

It stopped in the late afternoon! Now it's just blowing about.

[ashlyme]

That's still pretty awesome! I mean, I come from a land where they think half an inch is the New Ice Age, so.

Re: Apotropaic

[nodrog]

You are the only person I know who would casually use that word - or even know it.

Pleezda meetcha!

---

Could it be arranged, I imagine your correspondence with H L Mencken would be fascinating to read.  You may remember that he was the one who - upon request, if I recall it aright - coined the term ecdysiast.

[movingfinger]

The rattling kind of snow, not the soft patting kind?

I wish you safe and warm day, with generous applications of warm cats as needed to recover from talking to the bureaucracy.

[sovay]

The rattling kind of snow, not the soft patting kind?

The fine dry kind rather than the huge spiraling flakes, but it still built up.

I wish you safe and warm day, with generous applications of warm cats as needed to recover from talking to the bureaucracy.

Thank you! So far, knock wood, so good.

[gwynnega]

As usual this time of year, I have snow envy, although (or perhaps because) I have no practical knowledge of what dealing with it is like.

[sovay]

As usual this time of year, I have snow envy, although (or perhaps because) I have no practical knowledge of what dealing with it is like.

Well, since we don't have to shovel it, at the moment it is primarily decorative. I am not enjoying the part where my hands and feet are cold all the time regardless of layers, but I blame that on our apartment's poor insulation.