Tag: nature

Bring it, bitches

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, TeachingLeave a comment

The storm that was supposed to hit Monday night fizzled, leaving us with not even a dusting of snow, but I am assured that the predictions of 4-8″ in the next several hours plus 45-50 mile an hour winds are real. We have a new superintendent this year and it’s always hard to predict how the new dude is going to react to things, but nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard and definitely nobody wants kids walking to school in the middle of a blizzard featuring 50 mph winds.

So fuck it, I am predicting an actual snow day tomorrow. There are literally no consequences if I’m wrong other than mild disappointment early in the morning so I’m making the call.

The best thing about this? Because my building is planning on some standardized testing tomorrow– today went as predicted; I don’t have any real complaints other than I’m tired as hell– we kept everyone’s iPads. There are always going to be some kids who leave their iPads at school rather than taking them home, but in this particular case it’s all of them, so if we have an e-learning day tomorrow there’s genuinely no point in even posting something because nobody will be able to do it. Which means no one will be bothering me about it all day.

Does the district know this? They do not. Don’t tell ’em, either.

There’s a new book in Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archives series coming Friday. It’s going to be over thirteen hundred pages in hardback, supposedly, and no volume of the so-far five-book series has come in at under a thousand. I have read the first two. I started the third one when it came out, way back in 2017, and never finished it. I should check and see if I wrote anything about it here, (Edit: I did!) but my recollection is that I decided the books thought the wrong people were the heroes, and I ended up not ever picking it back up.

It crossed my mind yesterday to see if I can read the entire series in the month of January. That would mean rereading the first two books, finishing the third, then reading the fourth and fifth for the first time– nearly six thousand pages in 31 days.

For a normal person that would be insurmountable. I am not a normal person. I’m up to 161 books in 2024 so far, with three weeks left to go, and this is Brandon Sanderson prose, which reads faster than normal. I also have the entire first week of January off and a three-day weekend for MLK day, plus potentially another snow day or two if I get really lucky. It’s not even 200 pages a day. I’m pretty sure I’m already pulling off higher numbers than that, but I’m not about to do the math and my Goodreads summary isn’t out yet.

What do you think? Should I do it?

Terrible pictures of beautiful pictures

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, PhotographyLeave a comment

The Leeper Park Art Fair was this weekend, and I’ve been waiting a literal year to go buy something printed on metal from Josh Merrill, and we went and did that this morning. And, damn it, this looks gorgeous in person, and I was excited enough about it that I got it hung the same day we bought it, which qualifies as a minor miracle. So naturally now, because I’m a schmuck, looking at my picture of it all I can see is that damn smoke alarm and that it looks too small over the couch.

In person, not the case. That’s a 20″ x 40″ print, and in person it doesn’t look that small. Also, and in general, prints on metal don’t seem to photograph well; the colors glow in a way that I find completely entrancing in person, and I love this piece. That said, instead of fighting with glare and such to take another picture from my phone, here’s the piece, entitled “New Day,” taken from his website:

In case you didn’t click on the link, that picture is taken inside of an ice cave somewhere in northern Minnesota and it was seventeen below zero outside at the time. Josh is a lunatic, y’all.

Good morning! It’s cold!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography4 Comments

I have posted a ton of winter weather pictures over the lifetime of this website, but I feel like I’ve never even seen frozen spiderwebs before.

ID this bird

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography1 Comment

I think he’s a juvenile, which is messing with my ability to figure out what he is. A red-tail would be the most common kind but his tail is behind the fence and the beak doesn’t look right, plus he’s got that black line over his eyes.

Who knows birds?

On things I probably didn’t see

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

A couple of days ago, I looked out the window in my kitchen at exactly the right time to see a bald eagle briefly perch in a tree in my back yard and then fly away again. It was there exactly long enough for me to register the brown body, the white head, and the yellow beak, and long enough to process the fact that if it was some sort of crow with a skin condition it was also the largest corvid I had ever seen by a multiple of two or three, but not long enough for me to get my phone out of my pocket and get even a blurry picture. I’ll be honest; I didn’t believe my eyes.

A few minutes of research later, I discovered that not only are there known bald eagle nests in St. Joseph County, one of the more recently discovered ones is within a few miles of my house. So … yeah. It’s actually more plausible, given where I live, that I saw an actual bald eagle in my back yard than that it was some sort of mutant crow or cosplaying hawk. I mean, it was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. They’re kind of distinctive-looking animals.

This is the place where the post takes a little bit of a turn, so brace yourself, but: as of right now we’re three days away from the two-year anniversary of my mom’s death, and … well. I’ve actually texted her number once since she died, complete with an apology if someone else had the number. It either hasn’t been reassigned or they were nice enough to not respond to me.

It has been a long time since I wanted to talk to my mom as much as I did during that moment. Mom loved birds; she’d have been over here in a flash, and she’d have camped out on my back porch, winter weather be damned, until she saw the damn eagle herself. If I were a more spiritual person, I’d construct some sort of metaphor here abut her watching over us through the bird. I don’t have it in me to allow myself that sort of comfort, unfortunately.

But damn, I wish I had a way to tell her about it.

In which that’s enough, thanks

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

It’s not necessary to point out to me that there are parts of the country that have it far, far worse than northern Indiana does right now, and I’ve already done the “go to a hotel for a night because it’s freezing outside and the power is out” thing this year, so believe me, I get it. And the snow is drifty and powdery, and that’s the deepest part of the driveway, and a foot away there might have been 6″ of snow and a foot away from that it might have been back up to 15″. I figure the average depth of the driveway was around a foot of snow or so, maybe a bit more. The last time I had to clear the driveway there was only six or seven inches of the stuff but it was incredibly dense and wet, and that was a far more exhausting job than this was.

It sucked anyway.

We had a snow day today, such as it is; I found out halfway through 3rd hour that apparently on “snow days” I’m not expected to actually do Meets with my students. I shrugged and did the rest of them anyway. Tomorrow is Wednesday, which is supposed to be asynchronous (ie, no Meets) so that we can attend meetings and go to trainings; there have been no trainings remotely relevant to Math teachers for about two months and I cancelled the 8th grade team meeting because we’ve really only had two days of school since the last one. Combine that with the fact that I got caught up on my grading yesterday and my day is rather startlingly open, which I would normally regard as a good thing but I am definitely casting a wary glance at anyway at the moment.

This happened today, too, right outside my office window and conveniently in between classes:

I got another video of him that was closer, but this also lets you see some of the crows that were flying around (and making enough noise that they were the reason I looked around the window in the first place;) there were at least a dozen of them that I could see, and the hawk gave not one thin damn what they were doing. I wasn’t able to get a good look at what he was eating; it occurs to me that there are probably remains under the tree but I’m not going out there to look right now. I *think* this is the second time I’ve spotted this dude in my yard and I still haven’t been able to get a clear look at him– the first time he was chilling in a bush while I was taking the garbage out but he flew away before I could get a good picture. If he comes back a third time, I’m naming him.

(It occurs to me that I don’t really know where all the toads go during wintertime, so he might be eating a Deathwish. Best bet given that it was broad daylight is probably a ground squirrel or a chipmunk, but who the hell knows.)

Stay warm, y’all.

In which let’s go to bed and start over

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment
Lots of overgrowth, plus a goddamn tree fell down onto our fence.

Nothing today has gone quite right, y’all. My wife and I went out to clear some overgrowth along our back fence (a task that has to be done every year, at least, and which we do every two years, at most) this morning and I managed to whip myself in the eye with a tree branch somehow. Damn thing went perfectly under my glasses. Do we own safety glasses? Yes, we do, and my wife is an honest-to-God safety professional. Was I wearing them? Hell no, they get foggy and my glasses were supposed to be enough.

Hah. Dumbass.

It doesn’t hurt anymore but there is a visible scrape on the white of my eye and I spent a good several hours this morning and afternoon with the deeply weird feeling that I couldn’t see out of that eye when, in fact, I could. I don’t recommend that. People on Twitter were literally telling me to go to the ER. It was alarming.

Yes, I hurt myself, and then told Twitter about it and didn’t go see a doctor. Shut up.

Also our chainsaw is electrical and my wife managed to nearly cut the power cord in half at one point. It is possible that we shouldn’t be trusted around power tools any longer.

We tried to go to the zoo, but it was The First Nice Saturday of the Year, and holy shit was the zoo crowded. Like, “can’t get into the parking lot, the line to get in the door is a block long, don’t even bother looking for a parking spot” bad. So instead we ended up at the 4-H Fair’s Ag Days thing. The boy may officially be too old for this; I’m not sure. I was still weirded out by the whole eye thing and it’s possible that I wasn’t in a properly receptive mood to be surrounded by obese white Republicans with shitty tattoos.

My GOD, the shitty tattoos you see at Ag Days. Lord, y’all. I’m not usually the type to stealth photos of people in public to make fun of them on social media, but Ag Days makes that difficult.

Anyway. Cows, pigs, bunnies, alpacas. Never trust an alpaca. They’re all assholes, every last one of them. He didn’t really want to pet anything this year and was more interested in crawling around on the farm machinery that was scattered around. I took great pleasure in preventing him from crawling into the cargo end of a manure spreader by telling him what it was. Y’know. Family stuff.

Point is, today really hasn’t quite gone like I wanted it to, and I started a book on Monday or so that I’ve been saving for Spring Break because it’s long and I knew it was gonna be a tough read, and I finally gave up on it and put it down today because it’s just bad, and … bleh. I need to go to bed early tonight and find a way to do something fun with my last day of spring break, because I know my tendency is going to be to spend all day tomorrow in a bad mood and I don’t want to inflict that on my family.

So. Yeah.

Okay I like this one

On By Luther M. SilerIn art3 Comments

I’ve been kinda lethargic and sick-ish all day, and had actually been in bed for about an hour and a half before dragging myself out to draw a picture.  I’d previously figured oh to hell with it I’ll do two tomorrow and then got up anyway.  This happened; I like it enough to share it:

IMG_6766

Important fact: everything I’ve drawn so far has had a reference to it, either a .jpg I Googled somewhere or a photo reference or a still life object on my desk or something.  I actually grabbed this from a coloring book website.  I’ll let you know when I start doing genuinely original stuff.  🙂

(Also: added an “Art” category, the first new category I’ve added to the blog in years.)