Some Temporal Issues from the Last Post

I noticed, after posting my last entry, which closed out 2025, that the blog had reached a total of 365 posts.  That would be a pretty good number if I had been blogging for a year, but in reality I started the blog in 2010. 

I also wrote that the final episode of Newhart had aired in the Eighties, though the actual air date was May 21, 1990, which most people would consider the Nineties.  One can make the mathematical argument that, since there was no “year zero” (the calendar goes directly from 1 BC to AD 1) that first decade of the AD time period was 1-10, and by the same principle “the Eighties” would actually be 1981-1990.  I remember some people making that same argument back when everyone assumed that the new millennium would begin in 2000.  However, I think that it is best not to attempt that argument, and rather to save my strength for arguing the superiority of meteorological winter to astronomical winter.  

The End of the Year

I haven’t had time this year to post much more than a few random photos to keep up my personal goal of at least one post per month.  

I suppose that it’s time to write something to sum up the year, but I don’t know how to do that, so I’ll just put up this close-up of ice in a bird bath. 

Ten Years

It was ten years ago today that I began this blog.  It seems crazy that it’s been ten years, but then it seems crazy that I’ve done anything for ten years.  My original hope was to do something like two posts per week, but I just don’t have the energy to do that.  (I barely have the energy to get out of bed in the morning.)  I eventually settled on the goal of at least once post per month, and I have managed to meet that goal, with the exception of June of 2013.

I had also hoped to cover scientific fields that I find interesting, like paleontology and herpetology.  But that would require not only lots of research, but also coming up with something interesting and original to say about topics that other people cover in much greater depth.  And so I usually end up  posting random digital photographs, or writing commentary on shallow matters of pop culture combined with vague attempts at being funny.

The blog provides me with a minimal, old-school way of using the internet to keep in touch with people, without falling into the Sarlacc pit that is Facebook.  That’s useful, since almost all of my friends and family are now in other parts of the country,  

But the most enduring and important reason that I blog is that it gives me a false sense of accomplishment, thus making easier for me to sleep at night.   

On the Bridge

Life will pass one by, like the cars on a bridge.  January passed me by in terms of blogging, so I am posting this picture to give me something for the month.  

The Local Noodle Restaurant

Tonight I happened to walk by the local noodle restaurant.  It was filled with teenagers.  When I was that age, my peers didn’t go to noodle restaurants.  When I was that age, though, I don’t think that noodle restaurants existed.  I imagine that for the teen demographic a noodle restaurant fulfills the two major requirements, which are that it is cheap, and that it gives them an opportunity to get away from their parents.

Whenever I see a group of young people, I can’t help thinking that I’m still one of them, or at least not far enough away from that time that I couldn’t fit in with them.  I want to approach and address them thus: “Greetings, teenagers!  I am one of you!  I belong among you!  Guns N’ Roses rocks!!  I can’t wait to watch Dana Carvey and Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live tonight!!  I have a computer that I use for word processing and video games, because those are the only possible uses for a personal computer!!  My phone is hooked into a wall!!!”

And then I come to my senses and remember that I am well over 800 years old.  Now I’m just left sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time.  And I guess that everyone is left just sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time, unless you’re one of the teenagers sitting in the noodle restaurant eating noodles.  

January 2019

I suppose that it’s time to put something up in order to keep up my one-post-per-month rule.  I haven’t felt like blogging.  Maybe I’m still tired from all the blogging that I did in the fall.  And, at this point in the year, shouldn’t we all be hibernating?

It seems like only a few weeks ago when I was writing about how strange it was to be starting 2018.  Now 2018 is gone, and so is 1/12 of 2019.  

Anyway, here’s a picture from a few weeks ago.  It’s rare that I take a picture where the world is yellow and orange.  I find that mostly the world is nothing but grey and blue.  

Today

Today is Easter.

Today is also April Fool’s Day. 

And, given the way that Easter moves around on the calendar, I have to wonder if maybe it isn’t really Easter, but we are being told that it is as an April Fool’s Day joke.  

I also sometimes think that online scientific journals that publish papers on a continuous basis shouldn’t publish anything on April 1, so that the authors won’t have to continually explain that their study isn’t a joke. 

The Pond Frog

Unlike the green of the last photo, this one is more brown.  It’s an American Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana or Lithobates catesbeianus) in a drainage pond.  I took the picture at the beginning of September of last year. 

When one’s hobby is watching amphibians and (non-avian) reptiles in the wild in the temperate zone, there is an enforced period of inactivity in the colder months.  Birds, and thus bird watchers, are active all winter, but the reptiles and amphibians go into seasonal torpor.  In the Washington area the inactivity usually lasts (depending on variations in the weather) from some point in October to some point in March.  

And I have to admit that I kind of like this.  Something about being forced to take a rest appeals to me.  

But now the winter respite has come to an end.  A week ago I discovered that the Wood Frogs had already laid their eggs.  

Now It Is 2018

A week ago I watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve (which contains neither Dick Clark nor rock music, but does contain a lot of apostrophes).  And then it became 2018.

How weird is that?

When I was growing up, 1997 seemed like the year in which it would become The Future, in which we should finally have those flying cars.  But eventually 1997 came, and it was no different then any of the earlier years.  And more years came, and we got the internet, and smartphones, but no flying cars, or really, anything else. 

But now, for some reason, 2018 sounds strange to me.  It shouldn’t be 2018.  The world has gone on too long, it’s gone too far.  

But then, I am still trying to figure out what happened to 2005.  

If anyone can tell me, please contact me and let me know.  

An Old Picture That Once Was New

It looks as if we are only a few minutes away from June.  How did that happen?  It seemed as if May had just started.  

But then, I am still trying to figure out what happened to 2005.  

Please, if anyone can tell me, please contact me and let me know.  

Anyway, here is some candy lined up from last Halloween, an event that seems like if was only a short time ago, even though it's been seven months.  

Christmas Is Here

Christmas is here.  But it seems like just yesterday that Halloween was here.

In fact, it seems like just yesterday when it was September and I was back on the Patapsco River.  

That's the way that the last three months of the year are.  They throw up milestones at the end of each month.  First you're getting ready for Halloween, then suddenly Halloween is over and it's almost Thanksgiving, then suddenly Thanksgiving is over and it's almost Christmas.  It really makes one feel how quickly time passes.  

Yoda Best

A week or so ago I was walking by some tennis courts in a park adjacent to the local public high school.  I noticed a great deal of writing in chalk on the concrete walkways near the courts.  From what I could tell, the writing was a tribute from the members of the high school's girls tennis team to two team members who were graduating.  

Part of the tribute was the words "YODA BEST" (i. e., "you're the best"), accompanied by a drawing of Yoda's face. Normally, observing the activities of today's high school students makes me feel really, really old—or rather it makes me understand that I am really, really old, because I actually feel very young; deep down I feel as if I'm only a few years older than a high school student myself.  But here was something that made me feel that maybe I wasn't all that old after all—high school students referencing a character whom I knew when I was in high school.  

Indeed, by the time that I was in high school, Yoda already seemed like a relic of the distant past, just as Yoda probably seems to the student who did the chalking (although, to them, the distant past might only mean the prequels).

It's been almost exactly 35 years since we first saw Yoda.  

The Year Is Suddenly Ending

It seems as if only a few weeks ago people were getting ready for Halloween, and stores were advertising candy and costumes and decorations.  And then suddenly it was Thanksgiving and now it is almost Christmas.  

I haven't done much blogging this year, even though I have a million topics about which to blog.  After spending most of my days at work, I don't have the energy, or the self-discipline, to write in my free time.

I'll be taking time off over the next few weeks, so maybe I can catch up on all my unblogged blogging.  

Or maybe I'll just end up sleeping and watching TV.

Summer Has Slipped Away

Summer has slipped away again.  And I am writing about it again.  

At the end of November, I never feel like writing about how autumn has slipped away.  But summer exemplifies the two things that I hate most about being an adult.  One is that I don't get a summer vacation.  But the other, bigger thing is how fast time goes by.  When I was young, each summer lasted for an entire lifetime, a lifetime of heat and humidity and freedom and boredom and air conditioning and television.   Now it's May, and then there are a few weeks of warm weather, and then a few weeks of cool weather, and then it's January, and then a few weeks later it's May again.  Nothing seems to last.  It's like perpetually falling over a waterfall.  

But I can look on the bright side—since I've never managed to become famous, I don't have to worry about anyone nominating me to take the Ice Bucket Challenge. 

I Don't Know What Happened Here, but It Involved Christmas and Motorcars

I get very tired this time of year.  I am, as anyone who knows me can attest, tired in every season, but the tiredness gets to its worst around Christmas.  I attribute the phenomenon to the fact that the last week of December occurs between the darkest day of the year (December 21) and the coldest day of the year (on average around January 15) in the Northern Hemisphere.  And that's why I see December's end as a good time to try to get a nice long rest.  

At work on Friday I was feeling this tiredness, and somehow my mind drifted toward upper-class England in the Twenties. First I considered Downton Abbey.  (Although I probably have a fairly high genetic tolerance for Britishness, I can only watch Downtown Abbey for about ten minutes at a time, because it consists mostly of people disapproving of one another.)  Then for some reason I started thinking about a similar show, Brideshead Revisited, which I never watched, but saw advertised on PBS when I was younger, and checked the show out on Wikipedia.  

As the afternoon wore on, I began to more and more seriously consider the option of traveling back in time to become an aristocrat in England in the Twenties, where I would live in a vast country house and spend my days disapproving of people and driving around in a motorcar.  As far as I could reason, the biggest barrier to this plan would be operating the motorcar, which at that time would likely have been controlled via an odd assemblage of levers and cranks.

The Orange Glow of the Pumpkin Days

October is half over,  and we find ourselves in what one might call the Pumpkin Days.  The Pumpkin Days are a sub-season of autumn, consisting of the last two months of the meteorological season, October and November, during which our lives are defined by the presence of pumpkins—first  the decorations for Halloween, and then the pies of Thanksgiving.  

Halloween is approaching, and as always I am itching for something cool to happen.  And, as always, nothing cool will happen.  I'm not even sure what kind of coolness I want, but recently I have been leaning toward dancing zombies, along the lines of the "Thriller" video (but without Michael Jackson, because some things are just too scary).

And speaking of things meant to frighten us, as a resident of Virginia, I am spending the month suffering through television ads for the state's gubernatorial race.  The rest of the country is enjoying a break from electioneering right now, but for some reason Virginia elects its governor in off years.  Whenever one of these ads comes on, I silently yell "No!" in the manner of movie cop trying to push his partner out of the way of a bullet, and reach for the remote control.  

I have some minor new endeavors in the works, which I hope to get completed in the next few weeks.  Maybe they will come to nothing, as often happens, but maybe they won't.  

And soon the Pumpkin Days will be over, and the orange of pumpkins and leaves will be gone, and nothing cool will have happened for Halloween, and I'll be wondering how I missed out on walking around in the beautiful fall weather, but that's the way that life goes. 

Blogging Again

It's time to blog again, even though I don't really have the time or energy to write anything. This summer I've been too busy doing other things to do much blogging, plus there have been some technical problems.  There are many things about which I want to blog, but I never seem to have the energy or the opportunity.  There are things from 2010 that I still want to write up on the blog.  But I think that I've said all this many times before.  

The end of summer always makes me feel sad, and a little bit desperate.  I guess that it's a leftover feeling from when I was in school, and I didn't want summer vacation to end.  And the feeling works the other way, too.  In the winter, I still find myself thinking about all the things that I want to do in the summer, when I finally have some free time. And then I remember that I am an adult, and I have to work all year, so I don't get any more free time in the summer than in any other time of the year.  

. . . and I Feel Fine

Today was supposed to be the end of the world as we know it, but as of this writing we seem to still be here.  The idea that the world would end came, of course, from a misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar; someone assumed that the date for the ending of a large-scale cycle within the calendar was instead the date for the ending of everything.  

Beyond the misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar itself is the question of why anyone would think that an ancient civilization could correctly predict the end of the world.  And even if one does think that an ancient civilization could accurately make such a prediction, why limit oneself to the opinion of the Mayans?  Did anyone ask what the Incas thought?  Or how about the Aztecs? Or what about the Sumerians? Did anyone consult them? Or maybe . . . I don't know . . . the Carthaginians . . . or something . . . 

The Middle of December

Here it is the middle of December, and I am still having trouble dealing with how fast November went by.  Of course, November felt over by the 19th, which was the Monday of the week of Thanksgiving.  

As always, I have a lot of blogging that I want to do, but realistically I doubt that I will ever do it.  I just don't have the energy, or the self-discipline.  When I started this blog in 2010, I hoped to put up two posts per week, but in practice I feel lucky to do two posts per month.  

I will end this post with another poor-quality picture of a slug, which looks a lot like my last poor-quality picture of a slug.  At least for commercial purposes, the Christmas season seems to begin around Halloween, which is way too early for me.  But now we are past December 15th, which I see as a good starting date for the Christmas season, so please consider this a Christmas slug.  

Now November Is Half Over and There Is a Slug

It seems as if I was just writing about how it was September and fall was more than one-sixth over, and now it is November and fall is more than five-sixths over.  And it is almost Thanksgiving, but it seems as if Halloween was only a week or so ago.  (Thanksgiving is on the earliest possible date this year, so there really are only about three weeks between the two holidays.)  Time passing way too quickly is a recurring theme at this point in my life.  

I notice that in my last post, I had a terrible time using AppleWorks to draw the pictures of jars, but the slugs worked out pretty well.  Maybe I should put drawings of slugs in all my blog entries.