The caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland is totally a Vorlon.
He’s always asking “Who are you?”, has a short temper, speaks cryptically, and when he offers help, he won’t explain it. He relies on an alternate atmosphere supply. And in the Disney version, he even sheds his external skin and reveals himself as a winged being.
I don’t think he was ever named, but I think I should call him Kosh.
My first hint that something was wrong this morning was the extremely yellow sunlight coming in around the blinds as I got ready for breakfast, the color you expect right at sunrise or sunset, not after the sun’s already up. Once I walked outside it was clear there was a fire somewhere in the area, and as I walked around the building I could see smoke filling half the sky.
It only filled half the sky, though. The smoke rose from the fire near Glendora, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, and drifted south to Orange County before winds blew it west across Long Beach, San Pedro, and the Palos Verdes peninsula.
Off to the west of the plume, the skies remained clear. Clearer than usual, in fact, because high winds had blown all the smog out to sea over the last few days. To the north and west, the sky was a gorgeous blue, the mountains and distant city skyline crystal clear. (If you view the larger image on Flickr, you can spot downtown LA right next to the first telephone pole on the left.) Smoke in the southeast turned the sun orange, bathing the area in light more suited to the golden hour.
A few miles north and a bit later, this view looking south shows the clear blue northwestern sky reflected in the building, the smoky southern sky behind it, and another building lit orange by the smoky sunlight.
Urban Light at LACMA is a large square filled with over 200 lamp posts that the artist collected from various locations over several years, spaced wide enough to walk through comfortably. It’s like being in a forest of lamp posts — perfect for this week’s challenge.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t even planning on going there. We went to see the La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum at the other end of the park. Oil has been seeping out of the ground for thousands of years, trapping animals and preserving their bones in an incredible collection of ice age fossils. But the parking lot on that side of the park was full, so we parked in the LACMA structure at the other end.
Photo challenge (WordPress): Light Continue reading
They don’t have a rock this big.
For November 2013, I decided to try NaBloPoMo and post every day this month. I’d been getting all the NaNoWriMo emails, and while I didn’t have the time or story ideas (and Katie’s covering the “writing a novel” thing), I was a little nostalgic for a writing challenge. Today wraps up my participation in the event.
I learned two things about daily posting:
That quality vs. quantity issue especially bugged me when it came to my ongoing Les Miserables commentary. Those take a couple of hours to put together, and as a parent with a full-time job, free time is at a premium. I can think of a number of occasions when I sat down to work on my next article and realized no, I need to get a post up today, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish that one. Some of the resulting posts are worth it, including a few where I would have written a short note, but found that I had a lot more to say on the topic. Some, I’d probably delete tomorrow if I didn’t want to keep them up for the record.
I thought I’d do a breakdown of this month’s posts:
Broad Categories:
11 Life observations
9 Entertainment/reading
6 Photo-centric
4 Tech
Recurring Topics
5 Les Misérables
4 Trip to San Francisco
4 Local city observations
4 Comic conventions (the actual Long Beach con, wondering about WonderCon’s future)
Originality
19 Substantially new content at this blog only
4 Built around previously-posted photos (mostly from Instagram)
4 Short commentary posts linking to other content (3 of which were at least to my own stuff at another blog)
3 cross posts (two at Speed Force, one at Reading Les Mis)
I only resorted to blogging about blogging twice (except to fill out the links to my Les Mis articles and give them a little more substance), and only once did I just toss up a random photo to make deadline.
Full list (or if you prefer, a standard blog view of the posts):
Last week I finished re-reading Les Misérables. I’ve been working on this off and on for most of the year, taking breaks to read other books along the way. I don’t feel finished yet, though, because I set myself the challenge of commenting on the whole thing as well, and I’m way behind on that.
