Grey Many more grey-sky days than sunny.  At least fifty shades. Peter Yoder disdains a blue sky in his paintings.  I look at the sky regularly, day and night, and enjoy cloud-gazing, thunder-storm roiling bulges, and sunsets that distribute unpaintable variations.   A good sunset, often delightfully enhanced by air pollutants, spreads a continuum of dark to lighter greys to subtle and fleeting thin greens and a reach of hues of oranges and reds against a backdrop of fading shades of blue.  Then comes the horizon’s final deepest purple stretched to overhead near-black.  Then night.  That’s roughly why Peter, putting oil on canvas, when he comes to skies, refuses blueses. Childhood winter memories, from more than five decades past in northeast Ohio, suggest frequent (probably not permanent, memory being what it is) snow cover.  And blinding bright sunny days (which probably were infrequent, memory being what it is).  I believe I’d

Due to the frequency of Zoom, I’ve been opting for phone calls for one on one conversations.  I often throw on my coat and go for a walk while talking, a nice change from sedentary computer-ing.  We’re fortunate to live by a public walking path in the woods, right behind a police depot which borders our property to  the north. Last Wednesday afternoon I did just that.  The cool air and brisk walk were refreshing, and it was a good phone conversation.  I got in several laps.  My hands got a bit cold with no gloves, but alternating which hand got frozen while holding the phone helped. The call ended just as I was completing a lap.  I checked the news and noted that a mob had started to storm the Capitol building in DC.  I looked up and noticed that an unusual number of officers were next to their

We all have stories to tell about how our lives have changed as a result of this pandemic.  Some of you have asked, so I will tell of my particular journey.  Mine starts with maybe having contracted the illness in late March–who knows how and when it will end.  Soon after I recovered from being ill, I was furloughed from my environmental science job at AECOM because all my projects were postponed due to the pandemic.   As I was looking at options, I ran across a job posting directly addressing the pandemic and in late April found myself in training to decontaminate N95 masks for reuse in the Battelle CCDS program.   That started a different life for me/us that we continue in.  The adventure began with my first 3-week deployment in Indianapolis where we more or less set up the site for the work there to begin.  If curious, do

January 6 is the end of Christmas.  That’s what I learned as a child.  My family tradition was to keep the tree up until Epiphany. I thought it strange that so many others had bare trees on the devil strip on December 26 (having tired of the thing after putting it up the day after Thanksgiving?) or January 2 (start the new year “fresh,” according to an aunt).  We had no other Epiphany tradition or observance – it just meant Christmas was over.  The other, and more personally important, related tradition was selecting the tree on December 14 (my birthday).  Always at the Christmas tree lot adjacent to Beheydt’s Auto Wrecking south of Wadsworth, where at least twice I went with Dad in warmer weather to get a used part.  This annual family trauma-drama in the early years I remember involved lengthy squabbles among the four (and in later years,