rejectomorph (flying_blind) wrote,
rejectomorph
flying_blind

Brightness

The parade of perfect autumn days continues, the fallen leaves awash in swaths of sunlight, the soft air stirred by soft breezes, the distance a bright haze absorbing the horizon. But now the evenings rush, brief afternoons collapsing into night with unseemly haste. Tonight the darkness brought a surprise. Somewhere at the far edge of my front lawn a cricket is making slow but steady chirps. It's the first cricket I've heard in weeks. Strange that he would begin singing now, when the nights have taken on a noticeable chill. But his is not the first surprise the season has brought.

I missed the news a few days ago, but a comet that is usually barely visible, and which made its closest approach to the earth last May, has suddenly become far brighter, apparently as the result of an explosion under its surface, sending out an expanding cloud of dust and gas. It's supposed to be visible in the northeast after nine o'clock in the evening, but from here that part of the sky is obscured by tall pines. Maybe I'll be able to get a look at it later tonight when the earth has turned a bit.

Oh, and I've been on Microsoft Standard Time for the last couple of weeks. Because my computer predates the change in the starting and ending dates of Daylight Saving Time, my clock went back to Standard Time before everyone else. I've been late a couple of times while at the computer because I thought I had an hour when I didn't. I'm glad that I get to set the rest of the clocks back tonight, and the whole house will be in the same time zone.


Public Service Announcement: For any of my fellow technologically challenged computer users who are annoyed by the Snapshots (those little page preview boxes that now drop down from your cursor whenever you hover over a link to a URL at LJ and many other sites), spacecowb0y has put together this handy post which gathers together bits of information about how to disable the intrusive digital dingle berries in various browsers.
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