I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
Found by a photobooth,
Molly’s At the Market, French Quarter, New Orleans
For Christmas… I ask my friends and family for Amazon gift cards – at my age, the stuff I want (my lifelong quota of tchotchke and cute gifts is long overfilled)tends to the expensive side – far greater than the generosity of one person towards me. This way, I can accumulate them and add my February birthday haul to reach my consumerist goal. For example, I saved up and bought a decent camera a few years ago.
One unanticipated benefit of this – if you call a few minutes of amusement a benefit – is the time I spend looking through Amazon, deciding what to get. It’s kinda fun.
This year, I settled on a decent pair of binoculars. I have always had a soft spot for these. When I was a small child, my father brought back a pair of Soviet Military binoculars from Korea (how did he get them? I have no idea. The case had bullets holes in it). I loved those things… They lasted for decades but are now lost… Something had gone wrong, maybe a prism had come loose, and how do you fix something like that? No Russian optics repair shop down on the corner.
They were big and had the traditional porro prism arrangement. Yes,I did research on the various ways binoculars can be designed. Because of that, I was at first leaning toward a porro prism binocular – like this one. But nowadays the preferred arangement of glass seems to be the more compact roof prism. So after some (a lot, really) of research, adding and removing from my wish list – I arrived at the Vortex Crossfire. These are entry level, but quality scopes from a popular brand. Plus, they seem to come with a nice case.
They are now winding their way to Richardson from some unknown binocular warehouse somewhere. I’m surprisingly excited.
So, if you had, let’s say, somewhere between one and two hundred bucks in Amazon gift cards (not a lot of money, but enough for something) what would you buy. Fun to think about… but not to obsess over.
Starting a single new ritual or habit, whether it’s washing your face every night or taking a walk every afternoon, can feel daunting for many of us. And just forget starting a whole wellness routine. Mornings complete with journaling, meditating, and yoga before breakfast might as well be aspirational, reserved for only the most methodical among us…right? Well, not if you consider the basic premise of habit stacking, which says that you only need to find one thing you regularly do by default in order to build an entire tower of routine practices.
Imagine you have an interview for a new job tomorrow. Some people might think about what kind of questions they will be asked so that they can prepare, or imagine the interview going well. For others, the thought of an interview will cause them to toss and turn all night thinking of every worst case scenario possible – no matter how outlandish these may be. If you’re someone who has a tendency to do the latter, you are prone to catastrophising.
We Stand Together, George Rodrigue, The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden
President Biden wants you to forget about what happened in Afghanistan. He wants you to forget about the bureaucratic incompetence and incompetent decision-making by nearly every senior leader. To this day, no one has been held accountable. Accountability, even verbally, would mean admitting failure and taking ownership, something the Biden administration refuses to accept.
“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays
Morning Dallashenge from the triple underpass in Dealey Plaza.
Sometimes, because I go outside every now and then, I’m interested in the movement of the sun and the moon. When is sunrise? When is sunset? When do I need my lights on my bike?
And, up until Covid, some of us liked to ride our bikes in the Trinity River Bottoms and look at the new moon.
The moon rising over cyclists and the Dallas skyline. From the October Full Moon Ride.
It isn’t unusual, therefore, for me to look at a table of sunrise and sunset times. I was doing that today and discovered and odd fact.
The shortest day of the year is the winter solstice, of course. And that is December 21st, of course. December 21 is NOT the earliest sunset however. Here in Dallas, that occurs, well, about now, December 7… or a few days before and after. The sun sets at 5:20. On the 21st, the sun sets five minutes later.
And the winter solstice is not the latest sunrise, either. Here in Dallas, on the 21st, the sun rises at 7:25. But around January 10, it rises at 7:30. Pretty odd. Even though the 21st is the shortest day (nine hours, fifty nine minutes, thirty seconds here in Dallas) the sunrise and sunset are not symmetrically aligned with that date.
Bill Chance 