Big Brown Owl Flew

 

It’s white out there now.  We’re to get more snow today but then tonight, the forecast suggests rain.  It had to come sooner or later.  Tonight, freezing rain.  Tomorrow morning, freezing rain.  Not sure if it will be enough to wipe all this white cover away, but it will certainly change things for the intermediate worse.

 

A big brown owl flew across the my field of view just now, about thirty yards out. Ill at ease or perhaps intrigued by something else he saw he repeated his flight just now, back the other direction.  It can’t be easy to camouflage yourself with all this white cover.

 

I was just off the phone with a colleague in Japan.  I’d just read an article that the Japanese economy rebounded in the fourth quarter, and I was glad to hear.  Sony and Nintendo my colleague told me are doing well, what with everyone staying home paying video games.  And my thoughts went back to visiting Japan at this time of year, some decade ago, during Lunar New Year, and we visited Kamakura and did that classic hike over the hills to the sea and all along the way the plum blossoms, always weeks before the cherry blossoms had started to appear.  My old chum reminded me that plum blossom, what the Chinese call mei hua  and always paint, covered in snow, are called umei, in Japanese.

 

And so Japan is at work this week.  So is the U.S. and the U.K., but China and South Korea are off.  I too feel like being off, or at least half of me does.  I thought I might take on a project or two this week.  Redo my long out of date, LinkedIn page.  That’s the sort of thing that always gets pushed down the road.  I need to get the dishwasher fixed and install that new ultraviolet water disinfection unit downstairs.  Lots of things sound good at the beginning of the week.  If nothing else, by the end of the week, there will be time for that annual reflection which confirms that the Chinese had it right.  “New Years” should be tied to the moon, and when this moon passes, it invariably does begin to feel increasingly like spring, in a way that certainly never happens on January second. 

Monday, 02/15/21