Blog

Daily Connector | How is winter going? | Dan Halterman

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...

Walking while White

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...

Daily Connector | How COVID has impacted my life | Jim Fath

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...

Daily Connector | Epiphany here, there, then, now | Dan Halterman

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 (...

Daily Connector | On the third day of Christmas...one Snowy Owl| Ruth Massey

On the Sunday afternoon following Christmas, I met Christina, Jen, Natalie and Maya at Alum Creek spillway to see the ‘resident’ snowy owl.

Snowy owls nest and spend their summers on the Arctic tundra. During winter, owls will move south into Canada. During irruption years, they will also show up throughout the US.

Often, when a snowy owl sighting is reported on a Birding page, its location is in an agricultural field or its length of stay in a given area is a day or two, meaning very few are able to find it....

Blog

Pages