January and Octagons

We've taken down the Christmas trees at our house and at my folks' house.  Our tree this year was one of the smallest ones we've had, and once we took all of the paper doves, ornaments, and lights off of it, I carried it outside.  I enjoyed the tree, but while it was up it underscored how frat-house-cluttered our living room is.  I suppose whenever we decorate for a holiday, we cross over a saturation point.  

My folks' tree is a monster artificial tree that practically requires a blowtorch to take apart, and winches to cinch back into its boxes.  But we did it.  This may be the year I come up with some kind of origami collapsable tree contraption that my dad can manage (I'm seeing a rack-and-pinion mechanism that expands like a car jack, only tree-shaped).

The snow from December has melted and we're back to our regular upper-thirties rain and overcast (with occasional sun).  Since the hummingbirds were peering down the hole in the fountain's stone pillar looking for water, I braved the frigid water and reinstalled the pump.  Within an hour-and-a-half, they'd come back to splash in the fountain's flow, which made me surprisingly happy.

On the art front, I've been playing with octagonal symmetry.  The results tend to look like quilt patterns.  Whereas pentagons and Penrose tiles have to deal with the golden mean and the odd gap where things don't quite line up, octagons have to deal with issues around the square root of two.  What's interesting is that triangles repeating around an octagon almost will make a perfect five-point star (one can almost, but not quite, make eight pentagons fit around an octagon).  I stuck to squares, right-triangles, and isosceles triangles mostly.  It occurs to me that I didn't try using alternating half-circles set on a square's corners--but that might end up looking like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  Hmm.

The latest dream involved going on an archeological visit to an ancient stone tower, built by vaguely South Americans in some unspecified past.  The tower was more like a giant mesa, eroded volcanic plug, or stone pueblo.  I got caught in a shaft that was being used as an elevator and got mashed a little by the plastic gondola as it descended.  

When I got to the top of the tower, there were a bunch of other tourists there.  A strong wind picked up, and the tower began listing to one side.  We were directed to walk down hitherto unnoticed stairs before the whole thing could blow over.  

I can only conclude that the symbolism of the tarot card, "The Tower," has been added to my typical elevator anxiety dream, which, I'm  just now realizing, had the beginnings of the "lost in a constricting maze" elements in it.  Sigh.