...and Wednesday...

Some winter weather moving in today, with snow forecast for tonight and tomorrow. It's more than time, I suppose, but I'm not eager to drive in it tomorrow. Think I'll take the laptop home with me tonight so I can work from home tomorrow if necessary.

We'll be celebrating the Winter Solstice this weekend, even though it's not actually until Tuesday 21st. The length of the day doesn't change much at this point - here in Denver, for example, tomorrow's "length of visible light" will be only 22 seconds shorter than today, and in mid Wales (where Gwernin spent his winters) about 40 seconds shorter. So a couple of days early or late is no big thing. What I'm excited about, though, is the total lunar eclipse the night before - hope it stays clear!

Today's picture: Drom Beg again. If I remember right, the sunset now would be just about in the notch on the ridge line...



-GRG

Monday...

A busy weekend without much notable in it: put up the Christmas lights on the front porch, did a little shopping at a local street fair, puttered around house and garden. Weather was cold but dry, sunny on Saturday (bright blue Colorado sky), mostly cloudy yesterday and today. Took some pictures at the street fair, but haven't uploaded them yet. On the other hand, I found I'd missed a batch of the Irish photos when uploading to Flickr:



-GRG

... and Friday

Another mild, dry day, but windy: more weather coming in soon. We had been planning on going to an SCA event in Cheyenne tomorrow, but have pretty much decided not to after all, for various reasons. I had just as soon have the day off instead, as the next few weekends will be busy, and I am at bottom not really a very social person. This is good from the point of view of writing, which is generally a very solitary occupation. Book promotion, however, is another story.

Another Irish photo today, more reflective of the season than what I see outside my window: the entrance to Grange Stone Circle in the rain.



-GRG

...and Friday

Not much new here today, other than that the weather has finally become more fall-like. Just another new picture, then... Another shot from Beltany, with sheep.



-GRG

Wednesday...

Seems like a long week already - maybe it's the allure of the upcoming three day weekend. Today's picture: part of Beltany stone circle in County Donegal, Ireland.



Thinking about stone circles the other day, I started trying to count how many I've visited over the years, and came up with something between 30 and 40. Most of them are listed in Audrey Buhl's A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany, an invaluable book for the enthusiast, but I think I've also visited a few small ones shown on the Ordnance Survey maps but not included in his guide. A good few all together, at any rate. The ones that Gwernin has visited, by the way, are all real.

-GRG

More equinox

Weather's finally cooling off a bit. Appropriate - autumn equinox at 6:10 pm Denver time (MDT). We've losing two and a half minutes of daylight every day - nothing compared to the five minutes a day in Juneau, Alaska, where I used to live, but still quite noticeable over the course of a week. Still no frost, and not likely to be for at least the next week. I need to put up some garden photos, but I'll have to wait until this weekend to take them.

In the meantime, another stone circle picture - this one is Drom Beg, from our Irish trip last year.

Equinox

Although the actual autumn equinox isn't until Wednesday, we celebrated it yesterday. Not a big festival in Celtic cultures, I think, and hard to spot the exact day unless you've set up some convenient standing stones...

I got the first proof for Storyteller Songs and spent part of the weekend reformatting it. Finally got a little more writing done on Druid's Son yesterday. It was a good day to stay in and write - Denver had record high temperatures, in the mid 90's. Cooling off a bit tomorrow, I hope - we've been having forest fires in the foothills due to the unusually warm dry weather for the last month. Normally we've had frost by now, but not this year.

Well, at least it's good for the squash and tomatoes.

-GRG