Visitor of Light

Some nights, not every night, an otherworlder visits the corner at the foot of our bed.  I will wake and discover it silently and inscrutably standing.  Who knows how long it stares down at us as we sleep.  Usually, it is a short thing of shadow that walks backwards and away through the bedroom door and away through the hallway, or it's a manikin smudge with glowing eyes that folds itself into some dimension orthogonal to ours.  But its latest manifestation was filled with light.  

This time, its head was a featureless white globe of light.  It lit up the closet doors and the bedroom door and the bookshelves.  Around its wiry, curving neck and over its head was a frill like a dowdy lampshade or a dusty bonnet filched from Laura Ingalls.  Its body -- or at least its arms, possibly its legs -- were covered in thick grey skin, like an elephant's or a rhino's, with short squat triangular nails at the ends of its hands? Hooves?  

It stood at the corner of the bed by my feet, light streaming from off of its head, with an attitude of curiosity possibly more malign than inscrutable.   Then it stepped backwards, and, as if multiple, overlapping irises of gauze closed it off from the bedroom, it and the light shuttered itself away, leaving me, Mark, and the dog in darkness.

I've gotten used to it. 

Repeating Patterns

It's that pause during the year before it seems like everything happens all at once.  Thanksgiving will hit, I'll need to figure out some sort of holiday craft gift, start production, and mail out items soon.  And set up a Winter Solstice Lights Spiral.  While trying to write, going to work, and other everyday tasks.  Somewhere in all of this we want to send out holiday cards, too.  

We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite.  A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits.   Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."  

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The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.  

I was pleased with the effect, but I had a suspicion that I'd done something similar.  Sure enough, as I was going through my photo collection to try to find pictures for a family 2023 calendar, I ran across a design I'd done last spring that was virtually identical.

And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November.  I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.  

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I'm trying to decide if Twitter imploding is a good thing or a bad thing.  

On one hand, I have some contacts with writers, Math Art Folks, archeology, Pagan, and folklore specialists that I would hate to lose; on the other hand, having one less social media site to visit might not be a bad thing—Ursula Le Guin famously did not have a Twitter account.  On the first hand, it's kind of fun to see what other folks are doing, especially when I remember to use curated lists; on the other hand, virtual friends are virtual, and none of my family are on Twitter.  And then there's the whole DoomScrolling thing.

I might post more directly to this blog and less directly to other social media sites in an attempt to simplify my life and also to exercise my ability to focus on something longer than 256 characters, which feels like it has atrophied in the last two and a half years.   We'll see how well that works; Twitter (and Instagram) make it easy to fire off a quick post.  The same quick post with Blogger takes a little more effort (fire up a computer, upload photos, write text, import photos...) mostly because there appears to be no mobile app for Blogger.  

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.

Carousel Griffin

Made a quick visit to the Albany Carousel.  The last time I was there, this griffon was a partially carved hunk of wood beneath a cartoon banner of how it would look.