More pictures from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park here.
Category: Quotes
Walking. To Eternity.
3:15 am.
I flip through the morning papers. Jesus, why do I subject myself to this?
Politics (sigh), Middle East, Ukraine, Senator on the take, Earth camped out on a hot tin roof.
Alexandra Fuller in Fi: “How quickly we’ve messed this all up: everything melting, flooding, on fire.”
1536 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
And what a day it is.
While everything burns, I walk, here, on Fantasy Island.
Stars, stars and more stars painted on a cloudless sky.
6 mph breeze from the north. Leaves rustle overhead. Birds beginning to wake.
65° F.
This is mid-July people.
And, setting aside the weight gain which I will NOT let throw shade on a beautiful morning, not a single body part hurts. Not one.
There’s no doubt, absolutely ZERO chance (mostly because of my diet and conditioning discipline) that I will not live forever.
Continue reading “Walking. To Eternity.”Walking. With Vemödalen.
To bed at 11 pm. Up at 3:30 a.m. The Stanley Cup Finals stealing two hours of sleep that I’ll never get back. 4.5 hours of sleep today. 5 hours yesterday. 4 hours the day before. Not sustainable.
I lay there staring at LED letters flickering on the ceiling. This projection coming from a new clock, this one complimentary from a retailer seeking to redress my stinging complaint on an Amazon review headlined: You get what you pay for.
Wally nuzzles up to me, sighs, and rolls over. I slide out from under the covers, dress quickly, grab the camera gear and drive.
I check my weather app: 71° F — 94% cloud cover — 6% chance of rain — Humidity, Southeast Asia immediately before a monsoon.
1509 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
I pull in, there’s no one in the park. Correction. No one, except me and the Stamford City Park heavy machine operator combing the beaches, every morning. Yes, it’s intrusive, this large, John Deere Tractor scraping the earth, kicking up dust in all directions breaking the silence of the morning. Is this really necessary, beach combing?
Continue reading “Walking. With Vemödalen.”Light Child, Lightly.
a cloud,
a bird,
a moment
— Thoughts (@ForTheTape, May 31, 2024)
Notes:
- DK Photo – May 31, 2024 @ 5:39 am at Cove Island Park. More photos from that morning here.
- Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Swans: How do they stay so white? Spit & Sparkle…
Swans are the gentle giants of my local waterways: floating paragons of snowy serenity that cruise peacefully through muddy brown water amid the rowdy confusion of their smaller brethren.
And they present a puzzle. Around them, mallards, Egyptian geese and Mandarin ducks have plumage so varied that it seems like any little speck of dirt or grime would disappear into the design. But the swans, paddling around in water so opaque that their feet can’t be seen, tip their tail feathers high in the air to forage underwater for the deepest plants—yet they re-emerge an unreasonably pure white. How do they stay so clean?
[…]
Just as a swan uses an oily coating to repel water, to get rid of oil it needs a watery coating. And the answer—discovered only three years ago in a paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials—is saliva. A swan’s spit is full of proteins that have a water-loving end and an oil-loving end. Once in a while, the bird distributes saliva on its feathers instead of preen oil, and the oil-loving ends stick to the feathers, leaving the water-loving ends exposed.
This makes the feathers attractive to water, and so allows the watery saliva to penetrate deep into the feathers. Once it’s there, it finds channels lined with tiny wedges. The wedge shapes help surface tension push the water from the center of the feather to the edges, sweeping along and clearing out any tiny droplets of oil or fat on the way.
The feathers get a watery deep cleaning as the tiniest oily contaminants are carried away. After a while, air dries the saliva out, and the surface returns to its normal water-hating state while the swan is restored to its pristine purity.
It’s a fascinating system, and scientists and engineers are now trying to replicate it to make self-cleaning fabrics that we could use. But kudos to the swan, for having evolved the perfect spit-and-sparkle system for keeping itself clean.
Read full article here.
— Helen Czerski, from “How Swans Stay White in Muddy Waters” (Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2024)
DK Photo: May 31, 2023. 4:30 am. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos of the swans from that morning here.