puddleshark

For Poetry Monday, one more late Shelly:

“The flower that smiles to-day,” Percy Shelley

The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.

Virtue, how frail it is!
Friendship how rare!
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.

Whilst skies are blue and bright,
Whilst flowers are gay,
Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;
Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.

Another poem written in the last year of his life and published posthumously with an editorial title, though this time the title Mary supplied was “Mutability.” It’s common to point out, for context, that Percy and Mary lost three children in early childhood. Like many of his shorter lyrics, it’s been set to music several times.

He nails that dismount.

---L.

Subject quote from Anti-Hero, Taylor Swift.

mallorys_camera

Went over the bridge to poke around in the Hyde Park garden yesterday.

Grass clippings seem to be doing their job of keeping the weeds down, plus my lettuce is harvestable. I took home enough of it to keep me in salads for the rest of the week:

Also, most mysteriously, a California Golden Poppy had popped up out of nowhere, and this made me very happy because it made me think I might figure out a way to get back to California one of these days. The augers just keep coming!

Afterwards, I toddled off to visit with Belinda.

We talked about the Israel/Iran situation.

"But Hamas!" she said. "It's a terrorist organization!"

I shrugged. "How do you define 'terrorist'? A political organization that uses violence & fear to achieve political ends?"

She nodded vigerously. "Yeah! That!"

"Well, by that definition, Israel is a terrorist organization."

She stared at me, shocked.

"Here's the thing. For hundreds of years, the people who eventually coalesced to form the nation state of Israel were under Ottoman Turk rule. And then for 30 years, it was a British protectorate. And during that entire time, any organization that lobbied for sovereignty or self-rule for the area was outlawed and so naturally turned to violence to achieve its ends.

"It gets complicated, of course, because the majority of Israelis today are descendants of Ashkenazis who migrated after World War II.

"Still. If you look at the history of the area—the future Israelis were once in exactly the same position as the people of Gaza. That should give them—well. Not sympathy for Hamas. But at least an understanding of why Hamas might seem attractive. And that understanding is key to defusing Hamas's attractiveness.

"Instead, they are acting exactly like the Ottomans & the Brits who opppressed them—"

I could see the rusty wheels start turning in Belinda's head.

Whether or not she ends up agreeing with me is irrelevant.

But I think people need to get into the habit of doing heavy mental lifting on their own.

###

Then we toddled off to the movies!

We saw Materialists. I was curious about Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives.

Materialists is pretty awful.

But you know, the Hyde Park Roosevelt Theater has stale Raisinettes! And heated recliners. So, I had a good time.

frith

Two, two, two tasks in one: pony beside themselves and pony over the moon. So you get an anguished foal bawling like a calf while sitting over three moons. One moon is mostly hidden under Princess Luna's tail. Now the question is why is Princess Luna giving pony rides?

Well, I'm early, deadline is tomorrow. Now what? Maybe draw a pony whose hobby is eating grass, as per Task 7.

View Page Source works on Flickr if javascript/cookies are disabled, but it takes a while. I think it causes Firefox to use too many resources and everything gets very slow, then Firefox crashes. But I get my "original size" URL, despite Flickr policy.

Save an astronaut, ride Luna.

blackcatofmisery posting in

common_nature

My mom's garden has a vigorous knock out rosebush just beside it, and various bees adore it. Although I'm severely allergic to bites and stings, I will still follow honey and bumble bees; they're too busy to care about me.

_{Fun fact about me: I cannot smell typical roses. Knockouts are the only roses I can smell.}

( Photos beneath the cut. )

Current Mood: relaxed

mallorys_camera

So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:

Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!

This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.

On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)

###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.

puddleshark

Followed the path beside the River Frome down to Swineham, through the reedbeds, where the breeze sets the whole landscape in motion, and you walk in a world of half-seen things and unseen things. The rattle of dragonfly flight, and a glint of sunlight on wings. The endless pent-up grumbling ("And another thing...") song of Reed Warblers. A black-capped Reed Bunting clinging to a reed as it sways back and forth in the wind - now you see it, now you don't.

( Don't get your hopes up. It's hard to photograph half-seen things... )

summersgate

Boot. This was the subject of the Paint and Sip picture Chloe had us doing on Friday.

Finished today: Eggs. I didn't set out in the beginning to make frog eggs. I just wanted some green circles to doodle on.

It rained hard last night and this morning. The creek is up near the top of it's bank. This is where we put the bench that Chloe gave us. Last year this lawn did not exist - it was just high weeds and brambles. Between my weed wacker and Dave's mower we have created a lawn with a nice view of the creek. I feel like we birthed something! We're hoping that this is as high as the creek will get since it did stop raining a few hours before I took this pic. It would be a big bother to have to move all the lawn furniture, the picnic table and this bench to higher ground. We frequently have one flood each spring (where the water comes up over the bank) - we were hoping we escaped it this year.

Normally you can see big rocks sticking up out of the water here. The rocks are high enough that you can sit on them and enjoy the view up the creek. Most of the time the spruce boughs would be high enough over your head that they wouldn't touch you if you were sitting. We might get more rain in the next few days but at least it won't be a heavy rain - at least that's the prediction.

Tomorrow's going to be my house cleaning day. Sunday dinner, and it'll be Father's Day. I'll have a "sushi party" (everyone can fill and roll their own). That's an easy dinner to put together.

lizardjay posting in

common_nature

At the end of last month I visited Indiana for a week, and in that time went on FOUR hikes. There are too many pictures to put here so I'm posting a link to my ~150 picture album: My sister and I are both very into taking pictures so the hikes were very slow :D but I think it really helps in remembering that there's something interesting to see in pretty much every square inch of the outdoors. There is always a bug, or a fungal disease on a leaf, or a shiny drop of water.

The Album

We visited, in order:

Ritchie Woods Nature Preserve
Summit Lake State Park
Shades State Park/Pine Hills Nature Preserve
Southwestway Park

The pictures feature:

many, many insects
a stately gentleman frog, who very kindly let me get within an inch of him
snails
two snakes
cool looking plants/fungi
general landscapes

For the most part the locations are broken up by a couple non-nature photos, except for Southwestway Park (which begins at the photo of the yellow spider in the web). Once you get to the art museum pictures there's no more nature, unless you count the clouds outside the plane window.

( a couple representative photos )

frith

With Calpain whispering into the ear of our prompt master, we got saddled with a pair of idioms that have no business in a drawing challenge: jumping to conclusions and a leap of faith. Faced with the options of drawing a pony jumping a moat to reach the town of Conclusions or drawing Faith plummeting to her death, Faith was easier. I did most of the pencil work on time but it was only today that I finished it up. The submitter for day 6 is still open for a few more hours, so, success! Challenge met.

And presto! Yakutian snow pony chilling in the snow, where it's chilly. Since chilling = resting and thus doesn't require props like an ice box or chili or bubble gum or such the like, I went with that. It was the lesser of two weevils. I chose a Yakutian snow pony, for emphasis. Alas, snow is not easy to draw.

mallorys_camera

Of course, the real reason Israel bombed Iran was not to curb the Iranian threat to Israel's continuing survival but to curb the parliamentary threat to Netanyahu's continuing survival: In the days leading up to Israel's attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to be on the ropes after his opposition submitted a bill to dissolve parliament, with his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners threatening to support the measure and force early elections.

This is just so fucking craven, I want to scream.

The boys throw stones at the frogs for sport
But the frogs die in earnest...

###

Meanwhile, I'm gonna go to the demonstration in Gardiner today.

It'll probably be the smallest of the Hudson Valley No Kings events, and, of course, Gardener is a liberal enclave so any marching around and "Fuck Trump!" screaming I do will be virtue signaling.

But I actually looked at the maps of the various demonstrations throughout the Hudson Valley, and it looks as though the only parade permits they could get were in out-of-the-way parks or half-empty strip malls far from Hustle & Bustle Central.

If I'm gonna demonstrate where nobody can see me, I might as well demonstrate where nobody can see me close to my house where the parking is manageable.

###

Apart from that...

I Remunerated & went to the gym yesterday in a kind of fugue state.

This living through a momentous time in history shit is very exhausting.

cmcmck posting in

common_nature

We spent a few days in Conwy in north Wales recently and had wonderful weather for it.

A view across Afon Conwy (the River Conwy) with Conwy castle as a bonus.

( See more: )

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: ici

full_metal_ox posting in

common_nature

Content advisory: the following images portray animal decomposition and a messy (though not scatological) plumbing mishap, respectively.

This is the very first photo I took in the process of exploring my new surroundings in Florida. I was recovering from a lengthy illness and a lengthy road trip, and coming to terms with a discombobulating succession of life upheavals; accordingly, I began with a local animal in no condition to evade me.

This roughly crow-sized bird (species and cause of death unknown) lay in an oddly heraldic position suggesting a necromancer’s coat of arms, on the disheveled curb strip of a business that was both recovering from Hurricane Ian and changing hands—likewise in a state of transition. The red spot at heart level is a dried wild fruit of some sort.

Taken on 4 June 2023 at 19:48 U.S. Eastern Daylight Savings Time:

( Fined_be_ye_who_move_my_bones. )

Some while later, I suffered a clog of mysterious blue-gray residue in my bathroom sink (don’t worry; it’s long since been dealt with, although not conclusively explained)—and was fascinated by the delicate poinsettia-like radial pattern created when the water finally receded.

Taken on 20 July 2023 at 14:16 U.S. Eastern Daylight Savings Time:

( Mystery_plumbing_sludge. )

puddleshark

mallorys_camera

Damn.

Well, yesterday started out well enough.

I pulled out the last six wheelbarrels of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & other assorted weeds from my New Paltz community garden plot.

Before:

After:

I deserved a treat!

So, I trotted over to Hudson Valley Chocolates, and found Stephanie hard at work:

Stephanie is the French-born choclatier who supplies bonbons for the Mohonk Mountain House and various other upscale venues around the Hudson Valley. She has a small shop here in town that keeps whimsical hours: It's open when she feels like being open.

Wallkill is a place where the men walk around in teeshirts that say, Unvacinated, Unmasked, Republican, Straight. In the spring, summer, & fall, Wallkill is an intensely beautiful place, but it is filled with the most horrible people, so there's no reason to go anywhere near it.

But if there was a reason to go near Wallkill, that reason would be to visit Stephanie's shop, Hudson Valley Chocolates:

Got home. Nibbled chocolate. Began Remunerating. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Remunerating is dry stuff. I have to keep wiping my brain clean of excess jargon in between those weighty bouts of regression analysis. To do that, I surf the web—journal entries (and y'all do not write enough!), blogs, celebrity scandals, and when I'm really hard up, news.

Yesterday, the news was unrelentingly horrible.

From Ice Barbie's press conference at which a United States Senator—a Senator!—was handcuffed and brutalized to Israel's massive bombing of Iran.

This is all so fuckin' NUTS.

###

I can't remember the name of the podcast I sometimes listen to that once did a show about superpowers. Specifically: What superpower do people most wish they had?

I do remember that time travel was the most popular superpower—though not by a huge margin.

And if you drilled down into the sample of people who wanted to be able to time travel, they all wanted to be able to time travel for the same reason—so they could kill Hitler!

Well, now we all have the chance to kill Hitler.

That must be the silver lining in the current cloud, right?

pilottttt posting in

common_nature

This ~~big and scary~~^{small and not scary at all} spider was discovered on our ceiling. It was my macro lens that made it big and scary ;)

( See the big and scary spider )

summersgate

Rainbow Waves. This was a picture I started a long time ago - with gouache paint. I added the pen to it today and it seems to be done. I think I have an idea now of a new project I want to work on since the "LIVE" project is over. I want to work a little bit every day, every single day, even if I only put a line down, but it has to be SOMEthing. I have 2 different kinds of 5.5" by 8.5" books with heavy watercolor paper in them - hot pressed and cold pressed. I'm going to work my way through them, not with the rule that I will have a page done each day and move on to a new page the next day like I had been doing, but that I will spend time every day adding something to them no matter how small. I can't give up art-a-day. It makes me feel too good.

Women's group today. We played Shut the Box for a while before we left for lunch at Pub 76 in Stoneboro. I had a really good meal of grilled shrimp over cilantro rice with a spicy pineapple sauce. Tomorrow Jan and I are going to Chloe's Paint and Sip in Oil City and have lunch with Chloe beforehand at Baked Goods from Heaven. I'm spoiled.

puddleshark posting in

common_nature

( Read more... )

puddleshark

( A path through the bracken in the rain )

mallorys_camera

Did my four wheelbarrows of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & loose ground cover at the New Paltz garden early-ish yesterday morning.

Then one of the garden elders came down the path, pushing a rototiller that does everything but make coffee. Nodded at the approximately one-third of the garden that still needs to be cleared. Asked, Would you like me to use this to...?

And I said, No, because beneath the thistles, brambles, & bee balm, I keep uncovering delicate plants that were once part of some previous occupant's ornamental garden, and I wanted to give those delicate plants a chance to thrive once more.

And the garden elder nodded as if I had passed some sort of test!

"You're doing it the right way!" he proclaimed. "Give a holler when you've finished clearing the big stuff & I'll come back with this & help you with the low weeds."

Which would indeed be a God send. I really hate digging with a shovel.

Shortly, I will be scampering out to log today's wheelbarrow quota before it gets hot.

###

Other than that, I have been feeling super-anxious about the political situation.

It has occurred to me—and to 50 million other armchair analysts—that Trump's vanity birthday parade this Saturday with all those tanks is really just a pretext to turn the White House into some kind of armored fortress for when Trump declares martial law. Which will also be on Saturday. I mean, Saturday is fuckin' Flag Day! Could the symbolism be any more flagrant?

And I am anxious, and I am scared, but I am also disgusted: All of this was outlined in exhaustive detail in Project 2025. It's like American voters failed an open book test.

Hoping I'm wrong.

But the dots seem to connect, and the picture is one we've seen before.

Humans are ridiculous and territorial, and they never, ever fuckin' learn.

pilottttt posting in

common_nature

It was their first day out of the nest, which they spent on a branch just opposite our window.

( Read more... )

For more information (in Russian), see here.

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puddleshark

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Page generated Jun. 16th, 2025 04:42 pm

Reading

“one day i’ll watch as you’re leaving / and life will lose all its meaning / for the last time”

Heavy Mental Lifting

NATG XV, 8th Task: Cry Me To The Moon

Knock Out Honey Bees

Accept Loss Forever

Half-seen things

saturday

say hello to Indiana

NATG XV, 6th pair: Leap of Faith and 7th: Chilling Snow Pony

Never Enuff Dying Frogs!!!!

Conwy

A future fossil, and a moment of strange beauty in embotherance.

(no subject)

Silver Linings

And now about the spiders

thursday

Following a path through the bracken in the rain

The woods in the rain

Open Book Tests

Chicks of the laughing dove

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June 2025

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