Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness

So, we recently passed the Winter Solstice, the astronomical marker that prompts folks to announce "Yay, the days are getting longer again!" Technically true, but if the amount of daylight is your metric, you might want to cool your jets a little bit, since we're still in the bottom of the trough and will be for a while.

You see, there are other, mostly overlooked marker days between the equinoxes (when there's an equal amount of daylight and darkness) and the solstices (the longest day and shortest day of the year), and it is these days that really indicate when the daytimes are a changing. Those days happen to have old pagan holidays associated with them:

• Imbolc: February 1
• Beltane: May 1
• Lughnasdh: August 1
• Samhain: November 1

Why are these days important? Well, let's look at the conditions this year here in the City of Subdued Excitement, Bellingham Washington. On Samhain, we had 9.9 hours of daylight, over 2 hours less than that at the equinox and clearly in the go-to-work-and-get-home-in-the-dark zone. The length of the day continued to shorten until it was 8.25 hours at the solstice. Now the days are getting longer - hooray! But we won't get back to that Samhain length until pretty close to Imbolc - we'll still be beginning and ending our work days in the dark until then.

Here's a graphic representation:

This perspective, however mathematically true, can be a bit of a downer, but it does provide a more hopeful outlook in the summer. When folks moan on June 21 that the days are getting shorter, I remind them that the top of the curve lasts all the way till August 1 and there's no need to fret until then! (In fact, Coco notices without any prompting  a change in the sun every year at about Lughnasdh.)

One last odd factoid - except for Lughnasdh, we still have holidays on or near these mid-calendar days: Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween.

So, celebrate the solstice with all great gusto if you will, but keep those candles handy.

Disclaimer: I used the 1st and 21st of the month as a quick shorthand;  the solar calendar actually wobbles a bit, so the markers in a given year may be a few days off in either direction.

INB 2022

Well, it's December 25, so once again we bring out the apples and rainbows and celebrate Isaac Newton's Birthday! (YMMV)

We had some sort of arctic blast/bomb cyclone/winter storm/cold snap meteorological event over the past week, but it ended just in time for the holiday: temps rose from highs in the teens into the low fifties, the rain came, and ten inches of snow disappeared in a few hours. Gotta love the Pacific Northwest weather, eh? Happy (wet) holidays!

You may recall that last year and the year before that and the year before that, Godzilla movies were the centerpiece of our holiday festivities. Well, we have run out of affordable/available Godzilla movies (the only ones not in the collection are the rarities) so we have moved to a parallel track.

When I was a kid, I loved what we called in the dialect "monstah movies". I like this as a term of art, because it distinguishes from the Japanese kaiju movies (which have a vernacular and tradition all their own) those typically American (and occasionally British) films about resurrected dinosaurs or  giant creatures (usually the result of Science Gone Wrong) wreaking havoc on the landscape, with the plucky Hero (generally accompanied by The Scientist and The Girl) struggling to contain and then terminate the threat. Nothing better on a rainy afternoon.

Unfortunately, there's no Criterion Collection of Monster Movies - or any other decent collection, for that matter - probably something to do with all them coming from different studios and having different rights-holders and whatnot. In any case, thanks to the modern miracle of streaming video, here's what's on offer today:

(Full disclosure: The Fly is not actually in the category of Monster Movie, since it does not involve an oversized creature, but rather a man who transforms into something horrible. But Coco really wanted to see it, so despite my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, we allowed it. BTW, this will be the original 50s version, not the Jeff Goldblum one.)

So, whether you are singing carols or lighting candles or burning logs or taking astronomical readings or perish forbid watching Monster Movies, I hope your holiday is everything you want it to be!

Season's Greetings!

 

Operation Inner Tube

 

So, it was 26 degrees with a wind chill of 20 and freezing rain falling - what better time to go inner-tubing on the remains of the ten inches of snow that had fallen this week!

We suited up and tromped around the neighborhood, crunching through the ice-crust on the snow, looking for the perfect steep-enough-but-not-too-steep incline for slide-down. After a few fall starts, we found the perfect site, the hillside from Fourth Avenue down to the dog park trail. Coco tossed her tube down, got on at the lip of the slope, and... nothin'.

The tube just cracked the crust and sank into the soft snow beneath, holding our intrepid daredevil immobile. Conditions were not ideal, at all.

 

Undaunted (and to my surprise), Coco began dragging herself down the hill, using the inner-tube as a snopwplow to clear away the thin ice crust and the top layer of snow.

With that apparent success, I enjoined her to have the first run, but she insisted that honor go to me, since I was still at the top of the hill.

The success of the plow plan was not merely apparent, but actual! Bolstered with enthusiasm, Coco trekked back to to the starting line, and...

And with that winter activity ticked off the list, we came back inside for another cuppa.

Solstice 2022

stock photo

 Here's a little factoid:

The December solstice (winter solstice) in Bellingham is at 1:48 pm on Wednesday, December 21, 2022. In terms of daylight, this day is 7 hours, 54 minutes shorter than the June solstice.

Not to put too fine a pint on it, but today we here in the City of Subdued Excitement will have 8 hours and 15 minutes of daytime; it'll start in a little less than a half-hour at 8:00 am and end at 4:15pm.

Everyone always says "well, at least the days are getting longer now!" True enough; however, I don't think we really feel a difference until  what some people call the Seasonal Sabbat - halfway between the solstice and the equinox - in this case, Imbolc on February 2. Until then, we're still in the bottom half of the bottom half, so to speak. Until then, we're still toiling in the dark, as it were.

Of course, YMMV. Happy Solstice Day anyway.

 ***

BTW, you may have noticed there hasn't been a book club entry for over two weeks. It isn't really a dry spell; more of a shallow spell. I keep starting books but nothing lately has really grabbed me, so I put that book aside and grab a different one. I am hoping to break the streak soon, but we'll see.

 ***

my photo

EDIT: This may be the shortest day if the year, but it looks like it's going to be jam-packed with daylight! While it is a cold 13 degrees still, it is clear and crisp and sunny! Now, that's what I call a solstice!

 

Solitaire Book Club: The Spare Man

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal. The high concept pitch of this story would be Nick and Nora Charles (and Asta) solve a mystery on a cruise ship in space. The idea is charming and appealing, and Kowal pulls off that pervasive sense of sexiness, privileged egalitarianism, and brio that  William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Skippy brought to the Thin Man movies. What got in the way for me was the integration of the technology into the fair-play nature of the mystery. In a mundane mystery, it can be presumed that reader knows how elevators and train schedules and delivery vans and telephones work, and what is plausible or not in any given set of circumstances. In a science-fictional setting, the reader doesn't have an intuitive sense of how the communication "net" works or how "spoofers" work to get around detection or how the spinning of the ship to simulate gravity creates an erratic Coriolis effect on different levels, and whether or how any of these are important to the story and solving the mystery. We also spend an awful lot of time hearing how the heroine dials up or down the pain-suppressant and mobility-assistive tech within her body without it really having any effect on the story or character development.

Nonetheless, I didn't put it down, and while it meandered a bit on a somewhat bumpy trip, it certainly brought me to a satisfactory conclusion.

Special note: This is the second book in as many months that begins each chapter with a drink recipe!