Assuming Their Fullness, Slowly

Sun doesn’t really rise these days till just about seven in the morning.  That’s fine for me.  Today it can only just see outside around 7:07AM.  It’s only another week or two though till that old ritual I haven’t had to consider for a while:  daylight savings, will strike.  This will be nifty for catching the sun at 6:00AM but dreadful as the sun will be gone by 5:30PM.  China doesn’t practice this.  If they did and America didn't I would certainly point to it as evidence that China was strange.  I suppose that other continental country, Australia manipulates time this way.  I’m kinda dreading its arrival. 

There really are some remarkable colors outside.  The thin covering of clouds are all pink and slowly now all the colors of the trees, the flaming red of the sumac down at the edge of the lawn, The orange leaves of the towering oak that is set further back to the right and the solid, reliable green of the two cedars closer to porch.  I suspect we’ll be very glad for them once the first snow falls.  The quality of all these colors has changed in the five minutes we’ve had of light this morning and they continue to shift throughout the day. 

Had a hell of a time with a contact lens, driving yesterday.  It was only a thirty-minute ride over and a thirty-minute ride back but five minutes out a contact got lodged, somehow, back up or over in my eye.  You can tell it’s in there ,but you don’t really know where it is.  There’s an old carpenter’s trick I learned during my modest efforts at that trade, where you take hold of your upper eyelash and gently pull it out and let the lower eyelashes brush at your eye in an attempt to use your own safe hairs to dislodge whatever’s in there.  And that didn’t work. 

But it didn’t stop me from trying, over and over again.  And in doing so I just irritated my eye.  It’s still sore now.  I tried driving with the contact-less eye squinted shut and that annoying and obscured but less so than when my poor brain tried to make sense of the two conflicting messages with both eyes open.  It was getting dark (wait till Nov!) and what I really wanted to do was pull over and put a new contact in.  I must remember to throw a spare pair into the glove compartment.  On a longer drive this would have been a disaster. 

It looks like it will be cloudy today, but the colors are assuming their fullness, slowly in a remarkable, muted way.  There is fog beyond the canopy, below the hills, the way there might be crawling over the Rancho Corral de Tierra in San Mateo driving into San Francisco. But it isn't advancing.  It has just settled there, near the river in the valley. 

Sunday, 10/20/19