Delay Delay

I wish that I had a picture to share, but I don’t.

I’m sitting in Belltown right now, on the 12th floor of an office building where I should be entering orders for my temp job, but the server has gone down and I can’t do much about it.  I’m catching up on some reading (Sir Oliver Lodge, I might be equally in love with you as with John Tyndall) and some letter writing, but I haven’t updated this in a long time, so why not use my time here.

The view from here is wonderful, and I really will bring my camera soon.  Monday it was dusk all day here, low clouds and mist, but the past two days have been bright and sunny.  Clear.  Which also translates to: cold.  This morning as I hurried down to the bus frost coated all the lawns and cars lining the street.  I think the temperature plunged below freezing last night, but that’s only a guess.

The mountains were in sharp relief, still catching the colors of sunrise, and I caught other people staring out of the bus windows with me.  There’s something about the beauty of this city that continues to captivate me. 

I’m trying to use my bus commute for more than just travel, and I’ve started to note things down without knowing how they will be used.  I have been so busy lately that I have forgotten the moments throughout the day where stillness enters.  Simply jotting down “sunlight on glass buildings, the glare against the damp road” might help.  I have to be unafraid of notating in cliché.  I can revise it later, but getting down the sketch is important. Even if I end up writing “sunset” “sunrise” and “beautiful” way too often.  In reading for book club I found I tend to notice specific categories of words/images for each author, and I have to learn to trust my own.

More about Sir Oliver Lodge (and Sir Walter Rayleigh, and Lord Kelvin, and and and) here.

Vaults

I blew off class today.

Let me explain.  On Tuesdays I actually have several classes to choose from.  Well, two; one through the UW English/Creative Writing (thanks to Ash’s friend Ingrid’s friend Will, who sent me the schedule and said it’s a large lecture, I’ll be unobtrusive) and one taught by Dave Giles in the CHID department.  And Dave sent me the reading, all 67 pages of it, and I’d gotten through the vast majority, about the migration into the Central District of Seattle in the 50s and 60s.  Fascinating.

But then I got to the library.  Then I took out the books I had in my bag to kill time before class.  Oh ether.  

Outside, the snow fell in thick flakes.  The sky was Seattle grey, the wind low but present, the air cold.  What wasn’t dusted with a bit of snow was damp and wet.  Inside, the vaulted ceilings of the reading room at the library stretched like a cathedral and the oak tables with their lights glowed with inviting studiousness.  And I wrote.  I need to go back, to revise and edit, but I have pages now, and I’ve returned to my ether project whole-heartidly.  Welcome back to my life, Sir Oliver Lodge.  I missed you, and I didn’t even know it.