Just noted the following weather numbers in the newspaper (accuracy is always debatable since they draw their forecast only from one source and I believe in consulting 3 sources and making my calculations somewhere between them)
Yesterday’s low = 2.4 (not according to my arctic reading weather device, but…)
Last year’s low same day was 8.2
Normal daytime low = 5.4
Record low for this date was in 1982.
In conclusion yesterday was quilt, thermos and legwarmer weather.
Anyone catch that astonishing overnight low? Woke around 3am and checked the weather station 0.6 degrees it read. Had to turn on the light to be certain !
White and pink tree with mild blue sky prevails today however.
*
We were all outside the building late last night with a fire alarm, it was freezing. Some of the younger children were crying. My small male was wrapped in a blanket, perfectly upright, with his audio entertainment balanced on his palm. My neighbours go to bed early, I noted by the volume of pyjamas legs.
Two headlines today from Channel 4 news that appear to speak to each other out the window, over the runway and back. The second story is very tragic. A young woman student working alone at night in a lab became entangled in a lathe — dreadful accident. I had no idea that science students often work all night in labs.
US air traffic chief quits over sleeping controllers
Yale death: students ‘nocturnal’ due to work load
Volcano
Volcano: An inquiry into the life and death of Malcolm Lowry was an NFB funded documentary made about Malcolm Lowry in 1976 by Donald Brittain and John Kramer. (it’s viewable at the NFB site, along with a plethora of other documentaries, films, animation)
I was listening to the audio of this film while I worked today and the part that captivated my attention was the description related to the jetty that Lowry built by his shack in Dollerton, that withstood the weather and storms in the area. He was overcome with great sadness when he later heard it was no more.
Curiously he appeared numb or in the process of constant numbing to just about everything else. (Except when his shack burnt down, did he also build the shack? I can’t remember)
My ears also piqued at his early mention of gardening, how if or when he had a garden he’d grow nothing in it etc. and the latter description of gardening that came up in the final fragment before his life ended.
I happened to hear a clutch of this program driving somewhere last night and sought out the rest of it online. Her point about growth has resonated with me all day long, that it is a ludicrous idea that we’re peddled — growth, growth, growth, why, why, why? (rather than sustainability? or even shrinking?)
For almost forty years, Alexandra Morton studied orcas near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Those whales eat sockeye salmon. When Morton learned that these fish were endangered, she decided to save the salmon, in order to protect her whales.
Last fall, during an unanticipated and completely amazing run of Sockeye salmon, Paul Kennedy visited with Alexandra Morton near the shore of a feeder stream of the upper Fraser River, in Northern British Columbia.
Listen to the episode of IDEAS here
Malarky
I am very happy to have been invited to give the first public reading ever from my novel Malarky to the Irish Women’s Network of BC this Sunday. They are a mighty group of women!
Malarky will be published next Spring (2012) by Biblioasis.
Yet another hymn-somniac night. The snatch of sleep I obtained I was risen out of by a terrific thumping sound from the guinea pigs condominium.
I jumped to investigate, fearing one may have pole vaulted out of the cage and hurled himself against the wall. To find one of them, the dominant Darwin, with a chunk of Alfie-Cyril’s bunny white fur hanging from his mouth and a chorus of mutual teeth chattering. I had serious words with the mouthy fella in the dark and worried all night that Alfie-Cyril was being eaten in there by his brother. My son investigated Alfie-Cyril’s torso this morning for the missing patch, declared him intact and announced what we need is a third guinea pig! I love his expand the population solutions. We just need more of them, so dominance can be reasserted, he assured me.
I read page 212 (ish) of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project in Collectors/Collections section last night.
Wallpaper paste sky and rain event outside. A very even brush stroke above us. All paste left to right. Oh wait I see a patch of darker grey amid it. Or is it the white around it I see?
In an auditory reflection, this a rain event where the sound travels from the ground up, as opposed to the rain event at 4. 53 am days ago that woke me and all its sound came from above.