Library news bulletin regarding spy balloon

 

A large silver balloon was shot down this afternoon in an area above the reference section of the library I work at. 

The first sightings of the balloon were in the early afternoon, when library patrons nervously became aware of it above the public computers. An emergency staff meeting was quickly assembled under fears that this giant balloon was possibly a spy balloon from the competing Washington County Public Library.

Nevertheless a policy of restraint was decided upon, and an elderly library volunteer who probably shouldn't be working on the request list anymore due to cognitive issues was assigned to keep tabs on the balloon.

At 2:08 in the afternoon the silver balloon appeared headed towards a hanging fluorescent light fixture and concerns regarding entanglement were heightened. A slingshot that has been unclaimed in the lost and found for nearly four months was procured, and after several shooting attempts with a variety of spiky, but not dangerous, objects, the balloon was shot down.

One patron was treated for "startlement" at the scene.

No spy equipment was found in any connection with the balloon and no one remembered why anyone thought the Washington County Public Library had anything to do with it, let alone how they could be a "competing" library. The debris, including the robust skin of the balloon were removed from the scene. No further problems were noted in the aftermath of the incident other than a tendency for staff in the area to speak in a humorously high "baby" voice for the next couple of hours.

   

No more cars in the library: The FAQ

 

In my recent work to reduce the personal automobile's impact on modern life, I have presented some ideas to a public that has spent its whole life in a world profoundly dominated by cars, and these kinds of changes can be threatening, especially when people have no way to imagine something new.

That is why I think it is important to take it slow. And even though my position is perhaps a radical one, I understand that it might be best to introduce people to a more car free, walkable, livable, and non planet destroying transportation system by starting small.

That is why I have been behind a recent proposal to make my local library car free.

But even this small proposal has received a great deal of community pushback, and both the general public and some of my co-workers at my library think I am going too far, too fast. This is why I have decided to answer some basic questions to explain what this library car ban might mean. Too often people hear that we are thinking of eliminating cars within our library branch and immediately react:

"So you want me to walk all the way from the non fiction section to the mysteries?!!"

But the issue is more nuanced than that. And that is why I am hopeful that I can put some of the community's concerns to rest by answering some basic questions about this possible change to how people get around in the library.

1. Does this mean I won't be able to drive to the library and will have to take a bus with... other people?

No! Our parking lot footprint will remain seven times larger than the footprint of the actual library. You will still be able to drive to the library and park your car outside. You simply will be unable to drive your car into the library.

2. What about disabled people? It is not feasible for a disabled person to get around in a library without a car!

Through the use of wheelchairs, elevators, people movers, and a hook and hoist system, disabled people will be able to still get around the library and may find it easier to select materials and use our devices now that they won't have to get out of their cars to do so.

3. So you want me to walk all the way from the non fiction section to the mysteries?

If you find that the 145 foot walk to cover such a distance is too much we are planning on installing a Disney Ride-like buggy system that will visit all main areas of the library.

4. Is this just some kind of a trick to stop global warming?

Not a trick, exactly, though that could be a benefit. Rather we are hoping to redress the 127 carbon monoxide deaths at our branch during the 2022 library operating year.

5. Why are you going after cars? Cars stay in their lanes! It's the bikes that are the real hazard in libraries.

Then you will be pleased to learn that bikes will also not be allowed to operate in the library.

6. This all seems suspiciously anti freedom! How do we know that you won't ban open fires in the library next?

Rest assured that the library has no plans to ban or limit open wood fires in the library. Our Winter marshmallow roast is still the most popular library event!

7. You say you want to take it slow. Couldn't you just ban 18 wheeled commercial trucks?

We do not believe this would address the problems. Of the 85 fatal car accidents involving children in the children's room, none involved commercial trucks.

8. How many involved bikes?

Two bicyclists were crushed by SUV's. But please remember, we are also banning bikes.

9. Would it be possible to have stricter enforcement of jay walking violations instead?

As there are no roads, technically, in the library, we feel this would be difficult to enforce.

10. Since we can't drive in the library will we at least be able to drink in the library?

We have always allowed drinking in the library.

11. After people stop dying of car crashes and carbon monoxide poisoning in the library will we be able to resume driving in the library?

It will certainly be something the library board can take a look at.

Child soldier in the war on cars

 

As you may have come to know I have increasingly become opposed to the car and its culture. Though I still use one, finding it impossible to function in my life in Saint Minneapolis without a car, I have tasted the dreams of cities that have eschewed the automobile at least in some important part. And when I reflect on all the happiest places I have been to in my life, they are curiously along this theme and centered on the demotion or absence of the car. My inclination in writing this is to say that going to Europe with my wife, the happiest of occasions in my life, opened my eyes to the wonders of carlessness, but in truth, I have been a soldier in the war on cars, in my heart, from my early childhood.

I loved riding my bike through a nearby school when I was only five or six years old and was aware of some kind of freedom in it, freedom of movement, freedom from danger, that I barely understood. Disneyland, quite nearly the only walkable part of my whole childhood, was quickly the ideal for the kind of world I wanted to live in, though held then as some kind of a child's fantasy. And as I became a teenager my interest in nature grew exponentially not merely, as I may have first thought, from my love of wild places, which indeed is strong, but also, perhaps equally as strongly, as a place of escape from the all-encompassing prison of road, asphalt, and driving life as I knew it. And while New York was a wonder to me when I came upon it at age 17, that was as much for the dazzling effect of its subway system and walkable density as it was for its wonders, food, and culture. And more than twenty years later when I went to Rome I found its amazing pleasures only had texture, meaning, and gravity in the context of its sometimes vigorous walkability.

I often watch videos and read books on this New Urbanism, along these themes of a better world without cars, and sometimes I get restless and impatient with the dawdling pace of the changes around me, and the low standards people accept and praise. My city, which I would give a walkability score of around 30 out of 100, is regularly on people's top ten lists for most walkable/bikeable North American cities, something that never fails to alarm me and inform me that everywhere must be pretty bad. If Saint Minneapolis is a 70, and New York is an 88, then surely Nice, France is a 112, and as much as I love Nice, France, there's still plenty of room for improvement there. 

Maybe walkability is a Kelvin scale?

But as much as I feel negative and doomed about so much of the pervasive car culture, there is also a part of me that does thrill at every bit of relief from it, and every small improvement. There is some delight in not only seeing my feelings finally expressed a little in the culture, in books and podcasts and YouTube videos, and even, occasionally, thrillingly, in bits of tangible urban design. As frustrated as I am, I also revel in every little path in the middle of a shopping district, every closed street, proper bike lane, widened sidewalk, or dense, walkable environment. And though it is still the minority, I am nevertheless thrilled when something in my town, or even someone else's, is built for people instead of cars.

Maybe all this is even more on my mind through this long Winter full of snow and ice everywhere, spending too much time indoors, looking out a bit longingly at a world that seems dangerously icy, and still ever so full of cars.

Most of the fun you can have with Presidents

 

As I sit down to write we are all eagerly awaiting the President's State of the Union Address. And by "eagerly awaiting" I mean "we plan on missing it entirely". But roaming the Internet as I do, I may run into bits of it, and one has to admit, it is the Presidents' Day season, which runs from now through its culminating celebration on February 20. So Presidentia is on all of our minds. Why did Benjamin Harrison ask Carter Seville the famous question "What is this couch actually stuffed with?", and why did John F. Kennedy avoid saying the number 11? Was Monroe a vampire and does he still walk amongst us? Did Polk contrive to have an orchid named after him?

So yeah, sure, I celebrate Presidents' Day. A person doesn't so much have to like the Presidents in order to celebrate the holiday. Holidays aren't personal, they're symbolic. And ornamental. And gustatory.

Yes, I love the cuisine of Presidents' Day! 

Who doesn't like skewered mutton!?

And in this spirit I have posted the annual Presidents' Day picture at the front desk of the library. I was able to squeeze in eight presidents before I wearied.

See if you can find them all. I have included the official color version and the alternate black and white.

The ratchet tightens

 

For advanced clerkmanifesto readers:

In the course of a decade of relentless, utterly faithful writing, I find a pattern emerges in which my writing tightens down, like a bolt being fastened by a wrench. And I must squeeze out the day's thought, grand and glorious or trivial as it may be, in the space of what tiny movement is left, which is ever less and less.

And then eventually I think:

Oh, I can simply put a new bolt in and there will be so much rotation. 

But are there any more holes?

Oh. 

The World is full of holes.

And to be honest, I am not sure what any of these bolts I've so carefully tightened down are holding together.

Okay, I'll elaborate.

Sometimes I think of writing things. Sometimes it is blog posts. Sometimes it is whole novels. But my ambition is always strangely the same: That I should be able to write without expending any effort whatsoever. 

But here is the enigmatic secret that every writer, every artist, knows:

Writing is good (or bad), hard work. Except in the moment that you are doing it, at which point it isn't anything like work at all.

Meditation

I have started meditating.

In preparation to start meditating I read some books and other things about it. I ended up settling provisionally on a method in which I set a timer for about 15 minutes and then count backwards from one hundred. I focus myself in the numbers, rooting in the present, and then with each breath slowly count down. If my attention wanders I start over again at one hundred.

The lowest I have gotten to is 98. 

But I have done this hundreds of times. 

Between 99 and 98 I may even have written this entire blog post in my mind, in tiny pieces.

"No, my darling. We are not writing blog posts. We are seeking presence and peace."

One hundred.

Ninety-nine.

How my library is heated

 

I work in a large library. It is heated. This is important because recently the temperatures have been 254 Kelvin (We use the Kelvin temperature measurement system here at clerkmanifesto, but this translates roughly to minus two degrees F or minus 19 C). But no matter how one tots it up it all translates to cold.

But inside, with all our heat, it is a basically comfortable 295 Kelvins.

So why, so often when I come to the front desk of the library in my cozy long sleeve striped shirt and dashing black cotton stocking hat, am I so immediately chilled?

The answer is not because of cold air rushing through our front doors!

Not only do we have double doors creating a dead space entry vestibule, but we also have a long entry hallway.

No, the answer is ice cubes.

Human ice cubes.

Library patrons go out to the bus, or climb into their cold cars, and come to the library. They walk across the bitterly icy parking lot in their thick parkas, and the freezing cold seeps into all their clothes and hair and bones. Then they walk into the library, and like ice cubes in a room temperature drink, they start to dissolve, cooling the air all around them.

We don't control the thermostat here. 

All we can really do around here is run up and down the stairs a few times and exude.

My Muslim co-worker and I

 

I'm out at the front desk with my Muslim co-worker. This person moved here from Pakistan not that long ago. Sometimes we talk about religion.

When this happens I think: Oh, maybe I will learn some interesting stuff.

And sometimes I do a little.

But mostly what happens is I end up giving 15-minute mini-lectures on the history of Jewish Practice, dietary law, or the evolution of Hebrew.

First first friday

 

Every first Friday of the month here at clerkmanifesto I like to update you on what I'm reading, watching, and listening to. Like, for instance, last month I told you about...

Wait.

Seriously?

Let me check.

You're right.

I've never done this before!!!!!!

But it's such a good idea!

3,695 published blog posts and I have never...

Well, it's never too late to do the right thing. 

I learned that from Robert DeNiro in The Intern, my "Movie" pick from the "First Friday" post here at clerkmanifesto, in December in 2015.

Or, I mean, it would have been if we... did that.

So here's our first First Friday arts round up for precisely this moment of February, 2023!

Reading aloud book:

The brilliant Deadly Education by Naomi Novak, about prophecies and a dangerous school for young magicians. This is the best fantasy trilogy since, well, Lord of the Rings, and I can't say enough good things about it. 

Though you might want to keep an eye out for me trying to do so in some future post because, seriously, this is a masterpiece.

Book I am listening to on my phone at work:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This is very good book I sometimes love and sometimes just, maybe, like? It's about two friends and their long friendship and making video games and, I don't know, life? I doubt you will find me writing more about here in the future.

Visual Arts:

Grant Woods landscape painting. I love this stuff and have been looking around for it and might try and figure out why I love it so much sometime soon. With a post Impressionism and truly American distinctiveness I think the echoes of the influence of these paintings by Grantie are still running through our visual landscape, like a million capillaries, almost a hundred years later.

Book I'm reading:

Windswept by Margaret Preus. This is pretty good, like a fable, fairytale story crashed up against a far future dystopia story in a conscious way. I have a few books on my shelf that I am eager to get to and so I keep thinking of moving on and not finishing this book, but I can't, quite.

TV series:

Lockwood and Co., which is a terrific adaptation of one of my favorite book series by Jonathan Stroud. I've read the Lockwood and Co. books so often that an assortment of these five books have featured in my "First Friday" blog posts eleven times already!

Sorry, yes, I made this joke once before, and I know that I have never done a First Friday before, but if I had! 

Anyway, this Lockwood and Co. is about a dreary sort of eighties England in the grip of something like a ghost plague. The show is surprisingly well done, on Netflix, and I recommend it, but feverishly urge you, like as one obsessed, to read the books first.

Music:

This Orchestral Bjork on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUbTF0Dc2bo&list=PL1sRNOLTJSXBVWaXC7AFqagmGh_-XbFyR&index=11&t=7159s

YouTube Essays:

I watch an awful lot of YouTube essays, so, to be as current as I can, I will go with my latest "discovery": Baumgarten Restoration. These are videos where an accomplished painting restorer takes us through various fine art restorations. They are extremely soothing. Here is a link if it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G1C3aBY62E

Nice

 

It is surely not reasonable to judge a city properly on the basis of a vacation. The fact that we were temporarily rich, lived with one of the best daily food and flower markets I have ever been to out our front door, and had a view of the ocean ripped straight from a Matisse painting, were all highly distorting. So it would be improper for me to jump to conclusions and pass judgement on the Southern French city of Nice.

But what the hell. The world has grown prudent, measured, painstaking, and careful in its condemnation of evil, and brash and reckless in its expression. So why not then turn "evil" to "good"?

You don't want to turn evil to good?

Okay then, let us all, forever more, be prudent, measured, painstaking, and careful in our condemnation of good, and brash and reckless in its expression.

Nice is the best city ever.

It is full of ocean, which sparkles accessibly along its whole length. It has nearly enough trains and trams to go anywhere. The food is glorious and without fetishism, healthful and varied. It has some arts (though not enough).  And it is full of dense, charming areas either entirely without cars, or where they are much limited.

And this last grows increasingly essential to me. It is the cornerstone.

Here is my reckless idea for all of you out in Internetland today:

Cars should be illegal in cities.

No, not taxed, or limited, or discouraged, or phased out. 

Illegal. 

Like smoking in public, now reasonably banned, cars kill people. And yet like a relentless diet of fast food, cars also kill people. They cause toxic noise pollution, obesity, constant hazards to any other form of transportation, and profound economic distress on any city or country. Oh, also cars crash into things, and people, and animals, 20,000 times a day.

Yes, 20,000.

And so I have torn off the gloves. I have become brash and reckless in my condemnation of cars. Ban them. Crush them. If you see one, which I doubt will be a challenge for you, go ahead and SLASH ITS TIRES!!!!!

I mean, unless it's mine.

I'm not on vacation and, sadly, it's still the only decent way I have to get to work.

 

Puzzle madness

 

A bunch of puzzles started showing up at our library so we started a puzzle swap. This confused a lot of people who thought they had to bring in a puzzle to take a puzzle. This was an understandable misunderstanding, and we probably should have called it something other than a "swap". The first puzzle is on us, at the very least. 

I think a lot of people out there have a ton of puzzles, but they've never had a place they could get rid of them. So we now have many, many puzzles.

I brought a 1500 piece puzzle of an English Manor House with its fronting gardens into the library break room for the staff to work on at their leisure. Everyone was very curious about how long it would take us all to put together this rather large puzzle.

So we put together a pool where people guessed when the puzzle would be finished. Soon my co-workers all got kind of obsessed with this pool. 

The people who guessed a fairly quick and early time for the puzzle to finish started working on the puzzle with great intensity, sacrificing their lunch to try to get it done on schedule. But soon the people who guessed a later time started freaking out and sneaking into the breakroom to take apart sections of the puzzle to slow it down. Mildly barbed words were exchanged. A tussle almost broke out.

Only one of my colleagues remained calm in this whole, heated ordeal. And curiously he had in the pool the latest possible time for the completion of the puzzle. So I said to him "I admire how you alone haven't gotten caught up in all these puzzle fights. What's your secret?"

He looked around and, saying nothing, reached into his pocket, pulled out, and held up before me one, single piece of the puzzle. 

Then he smiled a slight, devilish smile, retuned the last puzzle piece to his pocket once again, and walked away.

More weather

 

I have been so busy complaining about and trying to hide from the snow and ice and absolute grayness of this Winter that I forgot to notice that it hasn't, on the other hand, actually been very cold this Winter.

Until today.

I don't know that I hate the cold. I mean, on the occasion I am personally cold I do find it miserable, maybe slightly less miserable than being hot, but probably not. That whimpering, shivering, unchangeable cold in my very bones is rough stuff, even dangerous.

But cold weather?

Of all the things that fascinated a boy who grew up in Southern California about a Northern Winter, the only one that still remains so alien and strange and compelling after all these years of familiarity, is cold, deep cold- extreme, minus something something degrees cold. There is something fascinating to me about air that simply, as is, is utterly frigid. Colder than any freezer. Colder than fake, produced cold. Colder than anything I can get anywhere else. Colder than I normally understand.

A patron came into the library tonight and I was wearing a thin stocking hat, as I regularly do these days. This person asked if a draft came in from the front doors and made me cold.

I thought. No. It didn't. But it was so cold outside that it radiated off of the patrons when they walked in. People came into our warmish library and for minutes just exuded cold they had been imbued with by merely being outside for a bit. The sheer coldness of the clothes of library patrons was chilling the library!

This happens with books too. They come in on the conveyer belt from outside and it's like they glow with cold, like they've been dipped in something magical and radioactive. I can feel the cold of them from five feet away. When I pick them up it's incredible. They are too cold to warm to my touch. There is something deep about their feel that penetrates so far into them that they become like other things. Things of a Winter world.

Tonight, when I leave to go home, I will step out into the minus five degree weather for a bit. I have done this hundreds of times now over the many years here in Minnesota. But even now when I anticipate it, I am curious.

Musical chairs

 

My ideal workgroup at my library is a lean, self-sufficient, and harmonious collection of mildly committed co-workers who like libraries. I have had this on occasion. And maybe I will one day again. But right now at my library it's a lot more like a bunch of random people of vastly different capabilities shoveled into a giant pile with the hopes that it will all... work out.

As the command structure of my library (always anathema to me by its very definition), has become even more layered, removed, and bureaucratic, the staffing has gotten increasingly disorderly. While there has always been a tendency towards this here, it has never been a more strongly held approach that if one just sort of shoves enough random workers at the library job it's bound to get done. 

We currently have a collection of old timers who tend to be very bad or very good at the job. We have some middle timers who tend to think they're better than they are, but who I will concede are generally... fine. And lastly we have new people, lots and lots of new people. We have people sent here from other county agencies that closed down, but who can't be let go (and rightly so), and whose skills and inclinations have nothing to do with library work. We have a whole group of people that have been sent here from one of our library branches that reduced to a skeleton staff during a year long refurbishment of their closed building, and we have a couple more people who I'm not sure where they came from or what their names are, but they seem to be around a lot and occasionally show up on the schedule. None of these people are particularly good at this job, or the alphabet. Also these people tend to not be such good co-workers, missing cues and lacking social understanding. They kind of clog up the hallways.

But despite all this we are a team. So nevertheless we must set all of this negativity aside. Yes we are a mass, an unruly undulated horde of labor, but in the end we are all here united in one common goal:

To find an available chair to sit in.

A virtue of ice

 

I wandered around taking pictures until my camera's batteries ran away. I did not realize, days later, when I collected my pictures into my computer, that I had taken so many pictures of ice.

This is a Winter of much ice.

So I guess it's kind of hard to miss it.

There is a lot of snow, too. But once a person gets out on all this snow one realizes:

Oh. It's all really just... ice.

The city has a way of compressing. Everything.

So does time.

Sometimes the ice is pretty. Sometimes it looks like it might be something else. And sometimes it's just ice that looks like ice. Its temperature is variable, but does not ever, EVER, exceed 32 degrees.

Here it is:

Dear Editior: Have you considered...

 

Dear Editor:

Have you considered publishing a high profile insider's non-fiction book about libraries? 

I have one for you and it will knock you off your feet!

Did you know that Libraries are not the genteel, quiet institutions we remember them as, but rather have become hives of villainy, bloodlust, sex and murder? The ultra rich and mega celebrities have been buying private sections of public libraries to conduct dark rites that control the minds of the nation's Senators and Judges. Secret rhino farms operate under the very noses of innocent library-visiting suburban families, experimental limb replacements are conducted willy nilly in study rooms equipped with one way glass taken from crash landed alien spaceships, Republicans are regularly embroiled in brutal fistfights with karate trained librarians, drugs are freely passed around that grant super intelligence to their users, but with temporary, "Flowers for Algernon" tragic effects, cabals of Christian sects are building Pope Robots powered by sacrificed classic novels soaked in the blood of lambs.

All of this is one hundred percent true!

Unfortunately my book mainly focuses on the intricacies of library card registration.

Still, I look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Feldenstein Calypso (Library Insider)

 

Annual Feedback Form

 

Thank you for taking part in Clerkmanifesto's Annual Feedback Form.

This form will only take you a few minutes to complete. 

Unless you do the whole thing. Then it will take longer. 

Also reading the instructions will add a significant amount of time. But due to the sunk cost fallacy you're already halfway there so you might as well finish.

I mean: Almost halfway through the first part of the first section, just to be accurate.

Many people ask us:

"Why would I want to take up my time unrenumerated to answer questions that are strictly to your benefit?"

To which I can only say:

It's not unrenumerated!

It's "unremunerated".

Shall we move right along then?

A. Wait, is that the first question?

B. I'm not ready yet. I don't have my number two pencil!

C. Who do I contact to "opt out"?

D. Argh! You tricked me into starting!

Please enter the choice that best reflects your responses to last year's Clerkmanifesto Annual Feedback form:

A. Mostly C's and D's I think.

B. I've done a little research and your last "annual" feedback form was 4/15/19! I have been waiting almost four years now!

C. At this point I can only remember answering anything that I thought would win me a Visa Gift Card.

D. This is a ridiculous feedback form. I would quit right now if I hadn't already put so much effort into it!

How do you best like to read Clerkmanifesto?

A. While drinking and driving.

B. I don't know if this counts, but I best like to reflect upon Clerkmanifesto posts in my head while I'm tying to fall asleep.

C. At work, so I can stick it to the man!

D. Reading Clerkmanifesto isn't really my thing. I'm more of a "Survey" guy.

If you could name one thing you would like to see on Clerkmanifesto, what would it be?

A. I wish that when you have multiple choice surveys instead of using numbered answer choices you switched to a capital letters format.

B. Not to be a copycat but I wish that when you have multiple choice surveys instead of using numbered answer choices you switched to a capital letters format.

C. I would like an opportunity to round up my payment in each blog post to contribute to some positive sounding non profit that is mostly about paying the staff of the non profit.

D. The one thing I would like in Clerkmanifesto is a little more humbleness... from everyone else! Because you, Sir, are one stone cold bonafide genius!

In conclusion please add the following content to the "other comments" section as if I wrote them in myself.

A. A roughly sketched stick figure of a person wearing some kind of hat.

B. A poorly worded request from a Russian Bot that asks you to visit some bizarre website that no one would ever be interested in.

C. Anything that might make me look thoughtful and engaged.

D. An ambiguous, handwritten "Thanx".

Other Comments:

Van Gogh in the reservoir woods

 

Yesterday I went to the Reservoir Woods. They are a surprisingly big inner ring suburban woodlands, and many times I could not see out, even in the bareness of winter, to the civilization surrounding me. It was a lovely morning full of snow and also full of me falling through the snow and swearing as the snow then filled in my boots around my ankles and then melted.

Naturally I wanted to memorialize it all for you. Using my phone I took some pictures but they were not good enough to meet the minimum standards required to appear on Clerkmanifesto!

"What" You ask. "Are the minimum standards required to appear on Clerkmanifesto?"

Check in every morning at 6:30 a.m. to find out! 

Each post is worked to its least acceptable standard, no matter how long it takes.

And never an inch more!

Anyway, my solution to this problem of not meeting my minimum standards with my photos was to ask my phone to put penguins into my pictures. That is what I showed you yesterday. It gave a slightly better feel for the area, though maybe it was a bit less accurate, especially since, and it pains me to say this, there were no actual penguins in The Reservoir Woods. But I also had asked my phone to pretend as if Van Gogh had gone walking with me and made a few paintings of the trees when I was taking pictures of them.

And this is the very thing I have for you today.

The reservoir wood aquatic birds

 

This morning I went out to Reservoir Woods to see if I remembered how to walk. I mostly remembered, but it was confusing because every rare step, randomly, my footstep would poke through the surface of the world and drop two feet.

"Crap." I might say. But didn't because of the great peacefulness that had come over me from being in the woods. 

Then I realized a bunch of snow had fallen into my boot.

"Crap!" I cried.

It was quite lovely in the woods and I decided I should take some pictures for you. I only had my phone, and I figured none of my pictures would be able to give the effect, but I took them anyway.

They did not give the effect.

So I asked my phone to put penguins into the pictures, if it could, to help.

That was better.