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.

Star Of Wonder...

We're gearing up for the holidays at our house.  Mark has been stringing lights along the front, and the other day he and The Child set up the ceramic Christmas village.

I managed to charge up the solar batteries on the holiday star (there's always a question if they system will work after 48 weeks in storage) over the weekend, which was relatively sunny.

The star is made of painted lathe strips wrapped in light strings.  

I had fun putting it up.  I was on the roof when a neighbor came out to his truck, so I hailed him.  He wasn't sure where my voice was coming from.  I did shout, "I'm up here!" but I guess he didn't hear me clearly, because he looked around, pulled out his cell phone, and then checked it.  I know it was wicked, but I did have to laugh a little (behind my hands, while muttering "Oh, I shouldn't laugh...").  A minute later, I successfully hailed his wife.

"Oh, I love that star," she said, much to my relief -- I always worry that the star is a little too much Country Cute Meets DIY.  

While I was wiring the star in place, it struck me that the pitch of the northern side of our roof is nearly the angle of the the winter sun in its meridian.  

Then we all trundled off to the local-ish U-cut tree farm and murdered a small tree to decorate for the holidays.  The weather was sunny and bright, and the temperature was in the 50's, which was a pleasant change from the times we've been slogging through acres of firs, pines, and spruce in the middle of a drizzle that threatened to turn into a snow storm.  

The new twist was that this was the first time we've transported a tree with the car Mark commutes to work with, and the top rack was so aerodynamically designed that there were no real corners to anchor the tree to.  It took a little trial-and-error -- when we stopped to check the ropes in a parking lot about two miles away from the farm, I was not happy about how much slack was in the rope -- but we got the tree home in one piece without fresh lumber flying into a highway lane. 

Thanksgiving Astronomy

Over the long weekend I managed to snap some photos of the Moon as it was between Aldebaran and the Pleiades.  The moon was a few hours shy of being full, so there's a lot of moon-flare in the pictures -- I had to use a two second exposure to get the Pleiades to show up at all, so most of the shots were "artsy."  This was a full moon with a penumbral eclipse, or I might have stayed up later trying to get a good shot of a temporarily crescent moon with the stars.  

One of these days, I'm going to have to put a little star on Portable Stonehenge for where Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares, and Fomalhaut are.  4000 years ago, they used to line up with the solstices and equinoxes, but they've progressed and now they're roughly 60 degrees from where they were -- so Aldebaran is opposite the late Autumn sun now, and Antares is next to the sun right now. 

Our Thanksgiving was at home this year; just us and no other family members.  I made entirely too much stuffing.  Next year I'll need to remember to use less bread crumbs and more spices and chicken stock.  The Child cooked a (pre-cooked) chicken.  Mark made twice-baked yams.   

This season is hard on my folks, who really would like to see everyone, and who have been cooped up at their house.  We could socially distance ourselves outside their house during the summer and early autumn, but now it's too cold and wet.   We did mask up Sunday and put up their artificial tree that is too unwieldily for them to put up by themselves while they (mostly) socially distanced.  

On the plus side, their house is a large, open-plan building; so it's not like we're all crammed together into a postage-stamp-sized apartment, inhaling each other's exhalations.   On one hand I'm still a little uncomfortable seeing them and risking COVID-19; on the other hand, I'm glad we did help them, because Mark discovered the wiring on their tree was faulty when he got a shock from a string of lights he thought was unplugged (once again, Mark gets Good Husband Points because of a Christmas Tree).