Work and Whatnot

"Thinking Hat"
Did you know these deceptively little blog posts sometimes take hours to put together? The gooder ones, anyway. (Let's be honest... some of the non-shiny ones too.)

Well, I am sad that I haven't had hours open lately--though for a good reason:
It's the end of the publisher's fall season and that means it's time for stuff I do freelance--proofing and indexing, mostly, at this stage.
Normally I pick and choose among projects but due to financial considerations I have said yes to everything. So I'm sitting here with a pile of manuscripts (half of them are in the ether, actually, but they feel like a pile), all due in a couple weeks.
I have a hard time blogging much when my brain is full of other people's words.

But my brain has also been filling up with blogging oddments--collecting shiny stuff like a magpie has become a habit--so I'm downloading a few here.
And here's a chance to use up some of the delightful Spock icons I yoinked from lemonrocket.

Vegetation
What with the temps hovering around zero degrees F, I've been forcing myself to go back to the YW. Yesterday I discovered that the Y has moved certain of the exercise machines to a new area, where they are all facing a wall of new, high-def flat screen TVs.

I asked the nice young man at the desk if there were any not facing TVs, or if any of the TVs could be turned off.
"It's not very meditative, " I said.
"Don't other people say so too?"

He looked at me tenderly, as if I were a defective panda.
"Most people..." he explained slowly, "want nothing. to. do. with meditation."

So, that would be a no.

Roman Solstice
My Latin-teaching friend Amy writes:

"The Romans called the winter solstice bruma. It's short for brevissima since it's the shortest day. I love the fact that there's a shortened version of the word 'shortest'.
They didn't call it a solstice because that means the sun seems to stand in the sky so they only used that term in the summer.
During bruma it races across. "

Flight Patterns
I ran into a man from my church days on the bus yesterday. He's one of those guys who pin you to the wall and relate facts stunning in their factualness until you slump to the floor, and then they tell you some more. (Very pleasant fellow, just entirely socially clueless.)

But for once, during our bus ride, he told me something weirdly interesting:
For fun, he follows airplane flight patterns--like, flight towers broadcast them on the web? (sorry, I'm vague on these details though he told me ALL ABOUT THEM).

Normally, he said, there are about 50 or 60 other people tracking the flight take offs and landings too.
But during the last visit of the pope, when he was landing and taking off at JFK, the numbers of on-line observers of the pope's plane were "in the three digits."

Occasionally I am stunned to realize that there are whole human worlds out there I am unaware of. These was one of those moments.
______________________
Now I am going to proof a book on Sudan, whose idiocies are, alas, all too familiar.