Another way of saying “ahh haa moment.” I have not had one of these in some time. I just am going with the cliched flow. No, wait, I have had ahh haa moments, but I now cannot remember them.

A lot of my ideas as of late have been ideas that have come to me but that I have built upon. For example, getting the quilt literacy program going. I realized that I am going to have to make a list of websites, put a brief descriptor under each one, and then talk about them with some of the members of the quilters guild.

Alys and Ryder

There. I just made a partial list of places the pillows might go. This would be a good start, combining parting with them, with story time and related activities.

I just keep plugging away at little things as they occur to me or come up. Inside my head, it’s a mess, there are piles of things all over. It’s like my external environment. But I can tell you this. There are windows in the cerebral portion of my brain and the light is streaming in.

Light is a valuable commodity. Today is the longest night of the year. Starting tomorrow, we gain two seconds of daylight. Then the day after that, four seconds of daylight. Pretty soon, the amount of daylight will be noticeable. I do not like driving home in the dark, so often I get rides home with Pete. Sometimes I leave my car at the hotel. The bad thing about this is that this inconveniences Pete. The good thing about this is that we are saving on gas. And in saving on gas, we are cutting down on carbon emissions. A disconcerting thought, that my driving has contributed to the death of 4 million birds off the coast of California. I read that the birds died of heat stroke. So don’t tell me that there is no such thing as climate change.

I remember when I was bicycling in Australia, there was no dusk. It went from light to dark in a matter of minutes. This, I was told, is because Australia is located close to the equator. I kept thinking that I had more time to set up camp than I did. I ended up pitching my tent in the dark numerous times. I remember that once, when I camped in a sparse grove of trees, I had a dream in which I saw black snakes with black and red wings. This has stuck with me all these years.

Here, the sun does lie low in the sky for some time – the mountains turn pink and orange, and the shadows are lengthy. There was none of this in Australia. There also wasn’t any snow. This year, it has snowed just a few times, but we still have more snow than they have in Australia. Year around though, they have light in Australia.

When we lack something, we start to obsess about acquiring more of it.

Next: 347. 12/21/24: Solstice