Yeah, two weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, we’re seeing the Russians amping up their war crimes, and every day is a new horror show. And it’s going to get worse as the economic sanctions tighten around Putin.
So let’s have Bonnie Raitt singing “I Will Not Be Broken”, since that’s one sure thing we know about Ukrainians. Whatever happens, and however long the Russians stay on Ukrainian soil, they will never break.
On one of my walks, I noticed…well, a bit of an oddity. To be precise, a cross made of pebbles at the base of a tree.
Then I looked at the tree.
RIP
We’ve had two days of temps in the 70s here in the District They Call Columbia, so I’m going to share some pix I took just <checks notes> a week and a half ago of my morning walk after an overnight ice storm.
It’s beautiful, but you do have to watch where you’re walking.
Also, I’m ready for Spring.
The news from Ukraine is horrifying, not just the targeting of civilian populations or the Russian takeover of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (the largest in Europe). Nor even the fact that Putin’s threats become more grandiose the longer the Ukrainians trash his army. It’s all of it together, and the totality of it weighs me down.
So this video of a German woman who’s got a friendship with crows
lifts my spirits. I’m grateful that it exists on the Web, and that someone sent
it to me. It reminds me that, with all the viciousness, cruelty and inanity humans can come up with, there's still good stuff out there. It also reminds me of the joy of looking away from the screen and out onto nature around me. I’ve watched it about six times since yesterday morning, and I’m
sharing with you.
You’re welcome.
We’re a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thousands are dead, tens of thousands of homes are damaged or destroyed. And Vladimir Putin—getting wiggier by the hour—is upping the warfare stakes.
I fancy something from a requiem mass. Like Fauré’s “Pie Jesu”.
There are many versions of this out there, but I feel like the
purity of Kathleen Battle’s voice is what we need.
I mentioned yesterday that I sometimes walk on a local golf course, and that it’s one of the very few places left in the People’s Republic where you have open space.
This is especially important at those moments where we’re transitioning from night to morning. Viz:
I have to say that—given the whackdoodle world
we’re living in—having access to this is a huge comfort to me.
For some reason, I dunno, I seem to need to get away from my screen more than ever. And I'm actively looking for things that don't relate to the worst that humans can do. So I try to walk a lot, even if it's just in short spurts.
One of the recent wind storms brought down a lot of tree limbs and branches. One benefit of this was that a downed pine limb brought to my attention this cone formation at the end of the branches.
Just gorgeous.
Last week on my supermarket run, somehow this package of gigantic blueberries hopped into my cart. I have to say that they weren’t as uniformly juicy as I’d have liked—bigger is clearly not necessarily better—but they looked pretty in a wine glass.
When I bought my big-assed dinosaur-sized camera last year, I promised to donate my old SLR to a young photographer, and last week I finally got the lens/body cap I needed to make the transfer. Before I handed it over, however, I cleared the memory card of all the photos still on it.
Here’s a sample:
My study of “Old Onion before Composting”
“Champagne and Candlelight”
“Weird Blind Pattern”
“Flowers from a Friend”
And blow me if there wasn’t this shot of trees:
I immediately thought, “That looks like Paris.” And, when I checked the metadata, indeed it was.
Hope the kid has as much fun with that camera as I did.
