Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: How will philosophy help steer my course today?
Lessons of the day:
1. When you have weeds, noxious chemicals are one solution, but there’s something very satisfying about pulling them out and making a huge pile on the patio, and then not having to immediately doff all your clothes and run them through the washer because they smell like liquid death.
2. If you take pains to make a space safe, your guests will want to come back and make themselves at home. (The dove on our porch apparently agrees).
3. Sometimes you just need to try something out to determine it’s not quite right, and you might need to rip it out and start over.
Philosophy does underpin everything I do, when you get down to it.
- The weeds in the back yard were getting rather intense. A few of them had grown to a couple of feet tall, and there was one in with my foxglove plant that I had thought was part of the foxglove. I was going to to at them with the chemicals, but I realized using my weed puller was actually faster and strangely rewarding. And as I mentioned, with no chemicals involved, I won’t have the faint scent of weedkiller lingering about me for the next day.
- The mourning dove is very definitely nesting again. It turns out a mourning dove can have up to six broods per year. Usually they do not keep the same nest from brood to brood, but apparently they like this one. Looks like, if all goes well, we’ll have chicks again in maybe about ten days. This makes me happy. The call of mourning doves is one of those comfort sounds–it sounds like the summers of my childhood to me.
- I designed a blackwork pattern for the Shostakovich embroidery based on the DSCH motif. I was originally planning to do it in gold, but changed my mind and ripped out about 45 minutes’ work and switched to red. This also gave me a chance to realize I wanted to rotate the motif all four ways in the design in order to bring out the geometric feel. I’m super happy with the results and the sort of metaphorical meaning that goes with them. Here is the single design, the first go with the gold, and the progress so far with the red.
Tomorrow: There are scheduled flights at CWH for both the Lancaster and the Mitchell. I am not completely sure I’ve ever seen the Mitchell fly on a day I’ve been volunteering. It’s going to be a gorgeous day tomorrow, too. Fingers crossed for later in the week – I have concerts down at the Shaw festival on Thursday and Saturday, and long range is not looking great for either. However, that’s also what the forecast looked like for this past week, and it turned out to be mostly not rainy.
There will be my two RPGs tomorrow in the afternoon and evening, and then that’s it for my vacation. It feels odd that we’re at the halfway point for August.
I am once again reminded just how achingly prescient and knowing The Suburbs by Arcade Fire was and is. The album is now eleven years old, and it seems to have captured a moment in time, a moment whose aftereffects are still unfolding.
And here, a road not taken, but the map was reused to plot a different course.
Scilicet 