rssWe are all both the victims and the heirs of our fellow-men. - Ellis Peters
2005, December 03
Excerpts from Ellis Peters
Winter sets in near Shrewsbury, from Ellis Peters, 1913-1995
Excerpts from Virgin in the Ice
They went out together into the cold and dark of the garden, and felt on their faces the first flakes of the first snow of the season. The air was full of a drifting unease, but the fall was light and fitful here. Further south it set in heavily, borne on a north-westerly wind, dry, fine snow that turned the night into a white, whirling mist, shrouding outlines, burying paths, blown into smooth, breaking waves only to be lifted and hurled again into new shapes. Valleys filled to a treacherous level, hillsides were scoured clean. Wise men stayed within their houses, clapped to shutter and door, and stopped the chinks between the boards, where thin white fingers reached through. The first snow and the first hard frost.
All those four days since the first snow the weather had followed a fixed pattern, with brief sunshine around noon, gathering cloud thereafter, fresh snow falling late in the evening and well into the night, and always iron frost. Around Shrewsbury the snowfalls had been light and powdery, the pattern of white flakes and black soil constantly changing as the wind blew. But as Cadfael rode south the fields grew whiter, the ditches filled. The branches of trees sagged heavily towards the ground under their load, and by mid-afternoon the leaden sky was sagging no less heavily earthwards, in swags of blue-black cloud.
Excerpt from The Confession of Brother Haluin
…December came in with heavy skies and dark, brief days that sagged upon the rooftrees and lay like oppressive hands upon the heart. In the scriptorium there was barely light enough at noon to form the letters, and the colors could not be used with any certainty, since the unrelenting and untimely dusk sapped all their brightness.
The weather-wise had predicted heavy snows, and in midmonth they came, not with blizzard winds, but in a blinding, silent fall that continued for several days and nights, smoothing out every undulation, blanching all color out of the world, burying the sheep in the hills and the hovels in the valleys, smothering all sound, climbing every wall, turning roofs into ranges of white, impassable mountains, and the very air between earth and sky into an opaque, drifting whirlpool of flakes large as lilies. When the fall finally ceased, and the heavy swags of cloud lifted, the Foregate lay half buried, so nearly smoothed out into one white level that there were scarcely any shadows except where the tall buildings of the abbey soared out of the pure pallor, and the eerie, reflected light made day even of night, where only a week before the ominous gloom had made night of day.
2005, November 26
Headache - Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)
What might a headache become?
Having a tree growing up out of me
Is often a worrisome thing.
I'm twisty and thorny and branchy and bare
But wait till you see me in Spring.
Headache, a poem from A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
WebSites:
Biography
Kid's Site
Banned Hamlet
Memorial
2005, November 04
Patterns in Architecture
A language for towns, buildings and construction.
If you look around in the northern part of the East San Francisco Bay at the housing that was built by developers in the forties and fifties, as well as most of what is being built today, you would think that no one has ever given any thought to planning, livability, or simple attractiveness. This is not so.
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, et al, was published in 1977 and is now in its 26th printing. It is the second of a series of three books; the first is A Timeless Way of Building, and the third is The Oregon Experiment
The book, A Pattern Language is carefully organized and addresses the architecture of rooms, offices, waiting rooms, small houses, large buildings, villages, towns, cities within the social context of how people live their lives.
Though it presents a theory of architecture and construction, the book reads like a series of meditations on human life, a social architecture. You can start at the beginning and read through, or start anywhere and read as much as you want.
These ideas are available to architects and developers. Why are they ignored?
Christopher Alexander's Website
Discussion of work by C. Alexander
2005, November 02
Chinese Worry Balls
A tip from a pianist friend - for finger strength and dexterity
Rotate these balls in both hands. They massage important accupressure points and strengthen the muscles of the fingers, palm, wrist and forearm. All important for violinists, pianists and students.
