sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2024-02-03 11:28 pm

Four nights I've been up in the city

I woke this morning with Hestia sleeping on my feet. She sprang off the bed each time I moved, then covertly circled back to pin me in place.

I was able to complete my birthday present to [personal profile] spatch with a jigger so that he no longer has to eyeball his ounces between the lines of a Pyrex measuring cup. Between the cranberries and the molasses, GrandTen Distilling's Craneberry is an almost parodically Massachusetts liquor and I look forward to drinking it when I no longer feel quite so New England Gothic.

This evening I walked with my father around the reservoir, the first time in almost exactly four weeks I had seen him without having to do it through a window. There were white swans on the moving water and grey skins of ice patched to the shore. The sunset did the molten chryselephantine thing and the clouds looked like the underside of frozen oceans.



A junked tire mooring fringes of ice; it looked like an installation.



The mirror half-melted across the stones.



My mother said I should put this one on my resume as a polar explorer.

I thought I recognized a piece of equipment from the first two episodes of Apple TV+'s Masters of the Air (2023) and indeed the Bendix gyro flux gate compass was used in B-17s. I was not wrong to associate it with marine navigation, but in the case of the one in my parents' basement I had been misled by the engine-oil smell which reminded me of visiting the USS Albacore. It is WWII-era; it came years ago from an MIT Swapfest and is not currently functional, which we would like to see if we can change.
theseatheseatheopensea: Illustration of the Sir Patrick Spens ballad, from A Book of Old English Ballads, by George Wharton Edwards. (Sir Patrick Spens.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2024-02-04 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)
There were white swans on the moving water and grey skins of ice patched to the shore. The sunset did the molten chryselephantine thing and the clouds looked like the underside of frozen oceans.

That's beautiful! <3

And the compass sounds very cool, although it being broken makes me think that it's a Sapphire & Steel episode waiting to happen...
theseatheseatheopensea: Illustration of the Sir Patrick Spens ballad, from A Book of Old English Ballads, by George Wharton Edwards. (Sir Patrick Spens.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2024-02-05 11:23 am (UTC)(link)
It's true. Time and direction, both frozen out of true, and a war somewhere to the north.

That's one sentence away from being a 3sf fill! I'm just saying...

<3