Burning Sun

Through a glass, through the haze

These pictures look like a dream, and the night still feels like a dream.

Mournful Pictures from a Happy Day

Dreams and Realities

Exciting, exciting, exciting news! A dream that I have had since 1997, when I learnt about hurling on a People to People Student Ambassadors trip to Ireland, has finally come true!  I've found a hurling and camogie league here in the City Where You Can Do Anything and have had a few practices.

Here's what I imagined I looked like after my first practice:

Notice from the background that I have magically relocated to Kerry, and that I am wearing an official Gaelic Athletic Association jersey.

Now here's what I looked like after my second practice: 

OUCH! Those are some muscles I haven't used in a while!

After yesterday's training I got to take home a hurley so that I could practice on my own. I felt like a kid who's dying to sleep with a brand new baseball glove under her pillow on Christmas night. Unfortunately a hurley would have been quite uncomfortable (and filthy) under my pillow. 

Sunday in the Grass

It was just gorgeous today, where I was. I hope it was gorgeous where you were and you enjoyed all the pleasures of the day!

un-charmed

Last week I was watching Charmed at the gym while I spun on the elliptical. My mom and I used to watch this years ago, so when I know it's going to be on I like to choose an elliptical near the screen that will be playing it. (That way I can reminisce.)  In this particular episode Page, Phoebe, and Piper were watching the northern lights appear in the San Francisco sky, at the same time as there was a full moon. "With this convergence," Page said, "it's like the universe is trying to tell us something. But what?" Then a unicorn showed up at the Manor and all three witches and the demons who came to attack them mysteriously lost their powers. (I didn't get to see how the problem was solved because I finished my course on the elliptical.

I've been feeling like there must be some universal convergence now in my own life, but it affects telecommunications, not spell books. The phones at the office have a terrible feedback while line 1 is permanently busy. (Thank goodness for the available, if ever noisy, lines 2, 3, and 4.) The internet has to be rebooted each morning and slows down by the afternoon. My mother's house phone will ring only once before it drops the call of whoever (often me) is trying to reach out. The only cable channel that my parents watch regularly, the Weather Channel, is futzy and usually out. The internet is sluggish. And then my mom's cell phone died a quiet but dignified death on Monday (after nearly six years of service, anyway). I'm still getting used to the quirks of my own new cell phone. And now my own computer, also six years old, can't hold on to a signal from the wireless and insists that it isn't connected to the internet when it is.

Anyway I'm not loading a photo today. I'm hoping this communication convergence ends soon.

Glint of Golden Light

Oh, there aren't any words that could add to these pictures, except to tell you how happy I was this evening, how restored was my soul.

4:35 PM

It's quiet on the second floor where I work. Whatever sounds we have are quiet sounds. It might be that the fluorescent lights hum in the hallway, or the humid air makes the windows creak around the air conditioner unit. Sometimes I hear footfalls on the stairwell; from 11:30 to 1:00 there are children in the school yard next door, if it's sunny. If it's warm, then the soft serve ice cream truck plays its tinny melody from 3:00 to 3:30. When someone comes to see me, I know who it is by the particular creak in the floorboards - short, quick, pats or one long, drawn out shuffle. When I send something to the printer out in the hallway, I hear the drum turning and the printer heads pushing across the paper from my seat in my office; if not, I hear the hard, fast, sharp bleat of an error message instead. From the hallway, where I retrieve the warm streaked paper, I hear the lower swells of my radio, reverberating and filling the otherwise empty second floor.