Recurrent Night

It's a stormy, moonless, starless Saturday night in the prairies.

Autumn doesn't start until the Equinox, but the cool air the rain brought along sure smells like it. 

It was that kind of a night--1,500 kilometers away--a month ago. And it was then that I wrote about listening to the calming sound of raindrops outside, which acted as an additional instrument to a musical recording. 

Rocky-mountain sunset.

Two nights conflate into a self-aware déjà vu, only this time around I'm only listening to the rain. But this night's eternal return also reminds me that the lady to whom I previously referred as my "Japanese mother" condensed that particular blog to a single line:

月もなく　星もなき夜は　ひとり聞く　雨音にロックのリフが重なるを

I cannot be a judge of poetry outside of Russian and English. Yet apart from being surprised that my observations are worth translating--and truly impressed by the effort--I realize that I need to be less verbose! 

 

Soccer Polly

This afternoon, I played a strange mix of soccer, handball (more like hand-and-dog's-mouth-ball), and fetch with Polly in the rain.

It felt like autumn. 

Tongue out, and basset ears flapping, Polly was quite resilient. As the game continued, the following rhyme manifested itself in my mind:

Polly plays soccer really slowly.
At times, she's a striker, at times--a goalie.
Her basset howl is loudest of all,
As she runs chasing that tennis ball!

This is not the first time the clumsy and lovable red beast inspired spontaneous (kids') poetry or stories in me. I just hope that some day, out of this collection emerges enough decent material for a children's book. 

Writing and illustrating one of my own has been a dream for about ten years. But, you know, work, college, work, Master's, work, work, work, PhD, work, work...

Tonight's Sunset

At the end of our late-evening walk with Polly, the basset, the Canadian prairies decided to give us a bit of a light show with the Sun's descent.

Me, in particular.

After all, I had recently blogged about the lack of differentiation in the prairie sky as compared to the mountainous terrain.

I was wrong. 

Here are those gloomy, low-hanging clouds with a slight purple tint. My favorite! 

And this--later--version of the sunset is a what-NOT-to-do with a wide-angle "fish-eye" lens.

But, sometimes, I cannot resist the temptation:

Drive-By Shooting (with a Camera)

What happens if you've got the wrong lenses with you, and you're trying to photograph out of a fast-moving vehicle?

Images like these: 

No fun angles and little control over lighting. 

But that is the best I can do.

I only have a few more days left here in the middle of Canada, and rain isn't helping. (Okay, it's helping reduce the 40C / 105F (with humidity) weather!)

I just wanted to show you these prairies around harvest season: bright, geometric strips of color with the largest being bluer-than-blue sky. My current residence in the Rockies is often referred to as having a "big sky," which, of course, is a polar opposite of this: low-hanging clouds over mountain peaks provide a lot of differentiation.

Despite prairie flatness, this kind of a landscape, too, has its own distinct charm, I think, especially because it shows man's connection to the land through agriculture.