Haiku of the Week: Mail

A big heavy box,
Must go to the post office.
Pity the mailman.

Words & Pictures No. 6 - The Mating Habits of the Arctic Pygmy Snowman

Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, every January the Arctic Pygmy Snowman heads south. Furthur and further south the snowmen march stopping only once they have reached a climate warm enough to begin melting their frosty epidermis. It is here that the snowmen begin to reproduce. For many years it was a mystery how this reproduction took place, but scientists now theorize that the evaporating snowman epidermis rises into the upper atmosphere where it mingles with the evaporate of other snowmen. Wind currents blow the vapor northward where it eventually comes down as frozen precipitation. This snowy residue builds up and is eventually formed into a new snowman. From there, the cycle continues.

Look Who's Been Knighted

How did I miss this news. Sir Terry Pratchett, how awesome is that (and if you don't know how awesome that is, then you clearly haven't read any of the Discworld books, so you should get right on that)?

Of course, the article isn't all good news. Apparently Sir Terry was recently diagnosed with a form of early-onset Alzheimer's (another bit of news that I appear to have missed).

So, to recap: Ridiculously happy about knighthood but very sad about the Alzheimer's.

Haiku of the Week: Patience

Wait. I hate to wait;
What I want I want right now.
I have no patience.

Resolved

So, the new year has begun. It is traditional, on the occasion of a new year, to make a list of New Year's Resolutions. I'm generally not one for this particular tradition, but, in the interest of creating content for this very blog, I suppose I can give it a go.

1. Find a new job. This is less a resolution than it is an imperative. Unemployment/underemployment ceased being fun a while back, so it's time to find a paying gig.

2. Finish something (writing-wise). I'm great with beginnings and okay with middles. It's the endings where I run into trouble. I can never seem to get to them. I'm going to try and be more disciplined this year and try to finish at least one of the many unfinished projects I've got lying around.

3. Learn to cook . . . something. I've become convinced that I would eat healthier if I knew how to cook actual food rather than reheat the frozen stuff that I eat way too much of. Couple that with my recent fascination with reality/cooking shows like Kitchen Nightmares and Top Chef and I think that maybe I'd like to be able to cook.

4. Renew my love of film. In recent years, while I've kept up with the big studio releases pretty well, I haven't ventured much out of that catagory. I need to reconnect with the independents, the foreign, and the classics.

There's a good list. It remains to be seen how well I'll do with it.

Words & Pictures No. 5 - A New Year

The image of the baby New Year and the elderly Old Year is a weird one. Anthropomorphising a concept like time just seems a little strange, but if you think about it the metaphor does hold up (at least in my hemisphere.

So, a year has a 12 month life-cycle. That first month is its infancy, so you can't really expect much from it, and January is kind of like that. The first half of it is largely just a holiday hangover, after all. And it's a cold month, and cold feels a little static, un-energetic; nothing's happening. February is the toddler month and the month where baby New Year learns to show affection (i.e. Valentine's Day). March and April would be adolescence and the teenage years respectively. As rainy as April is reputed to be, that would tend to fit with the idea of the moody teenager. Then comes May and New Year enters adulthood. June and July, summer months, would be New Year at it's prime.Not-so New Year starts to feel it's age starting in August and in September it notices that it's hair (i.e. foliage) is starting to change color and/or fall out. October the year sees its end approaching and begins to contemplate mortality (with Halloween). As the year winds down in November it is time to reflect on its life with gratitude (Thanksgiving). Then comes December where the weather's colder and the days are getting sholder, and then finally the life of the year ends on December 31st.

Of course, when one year dies, a new one is born. So really, when you think about it, a better metaphor for the change of the years would be the life of a phoenix rather than a human life span.

Haiku of the Week: Search

Looking high and low;
But hidden my goal remains.
When will my quest end.