As smoke is in the world

It's Friday, or as I like to think of it, Gentleman's Saturday.* Specifically, it's Friday the 13th, always a lucky day for me, a person who missed being born on Friday the 13th by a mere ~19 hours. 

It's been a month of birds-of-prey sightings: just this morning I saw another Deering Oaks hawk, a smallish brown one drying its wings while perched in a tree, holding them wide and letting the wind blow through the feathers. 

Everything is eerily green for January. It's 50 degrees and raining. There are teeny buds on the lilac.

We started out the week eating Chinese food and playing? solving? a mystery-in-a-box with Adam and Jeannette's wonderful upstairs neighbor, Dani. We were successful, but we required many hints.

Sleuths, sleuthing

*To be perfectly honest, I think of Thursday as Gentleman's Friday. Today is actually just normal Friday.

Sugar and tea and rum

Successes:

• A big work thing. I'm sad it's over until the end of the summer, when it starts up again (assuming I get the contract again).
• I learned how to pronounce Tove Jansson and Maira Kalman.
• I'm halfway through Adriene's 30-day yoga challenge.

Here I'm tempted to add things like "brushed my teeth every day" to this list, which is just pitiful, so I'll resist.

Beauty:

Another January day, another long walk.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

Spooky old-time children summoning the devil in the park near my house.
"Fessenden Park, 1938" (1938). Neighborhoods - Portland Press Herald Still Film Negatives

Oh hi, I didn't see you there. Coup? What coup?

We went to the beach yesterday with plans to meet a dog friend (actually two dog friends and one human friend). It was a bright, brilliant, 38 degree day in January, and the tide was low, low, low. As we approached the normally (in winter) empty parking lot, the heavy traffic alerted us to the fact that we were not the only people who had decided to go to the beach. Reader, there were so many people there. Like, a 90-degree-summer-day amount of people. I actually don't think I've witnessed that many humans in one geographical area since March 2020. Luckily, the beach was enormous, due to the low, low, low tide I mentioned. We were spectacularly distanced from the other humans, and we had a lovely time walking and walking on the beach. Mark has a new (to him) Apple watch, and it informed us that between our morning Eastern Promenade promenade and our beach saunter, we walked 17,000 steps. 

Clover hadn't met these dog friends before, and they got along great. They ran and dug and smiled. One of them found a stunningly large pile of discarded Doritos on the beach and later threw up on my shoe. 

The tune your bones play

The solstice started with a soft sky and ended overcast. We struggled to get a fire burning in our rusty fire pit, where I forced us all out into the snow, encouraged by hot chocolate, some with marshmallows, and a hot cup of ginger tea with honey for Edna, who doesn't do chocolate. Every fleece blanket we own was there too, though it wasn't really too cold. I didn't take a picture, there were no stars in the sky, and I hoped that the pitiful flame — not very bright, not very warm* — could symbolize the year we're leaving behind, and not the one that stretches in front of us.

Isaac and Edna, quarantined and tested twice, are here to make a little Christmas celebration with us. We are baking a little and cooking a little, and we have a little tree with a few presents under it.  

The thing about the winter solstice is it's just the beginning of the hardest part, even though I'm a glass-half-full person and the light is growing and I love the snow etc. 

*on our to-do list = firewood, kindling