Stormy weather

So there's a storm the press is calling a nor'easter coming tonight. Or is it tomorrow? Trying to decide if we should go to Brooklyn tonight or first thing tomorrow morning, I pulled a rune out of my bag.

I have used Ralph Blum's Book of Runes for ages, a decade or more, and find the stones to be very useful, a kind of Rorschach card for my unimaginative brain. I get direction from the images and ideas, and I love the way Blum writes. It's not brilliant, necessarily, but it's very spiritual.

Anyway, we couldn't decide whether to go down tonight or tomorrow morning as originally planned, what with the weather predictions so dire and all. So, musing on "New York City," I reached into my trusty bag of runes and pulled out Kano (click here and scroll down to "n"), which looks something like a less-than sign, and reading the corresponding entry, burst out laughing. The first word my eye lit on was "morning."

The runes never fail me. I don't always understand their message, and they don't always tell me what (I think) I want to hear, but they never fail me and I am almost always quite entertained in the process. I pull out a rune and laugh out loud sometimes. Check 'em out.

So tomorrow morning, we're off to Brooklyn again, way too soon for me, because Emerald, Lily's best friend from when they were 10 months old (their birthdays are a week apart) is coming to town almost two years after moving to Pharaway Phoenix. We have plans of all sorts, friends and meals and sleepovers and dinners, and maximizing as much time as we can with Emerald and her family. It'll be cold in Brooklyn, so I hear. Funny to hear me complain about going, right, when my last entry was so melanchology about missing it. I am a textbook example of a body at rest wanting to stay at rest.

If I'm lucky our next visit will coincide with the most glorious week of all in Park Slope: the week in March or April (global warming has thrown all seaonal predictability into a tailspin) when the callery pears that line 5th Avenue for a half mile burst into glorious white clouds all at once. Lily and I have spent many a walk down the avenue trying to come up with poetic language for the stuff. Clouds, goose down, snow, nothing quite cuts it, especially at that magical moment about 7:00 p.m. when the sun is setting and the street lights are a soft orangy glow. Magical. Lasts about a week, and then it's gone, until next year.

News flash! Lily has triops, a gift from our former neighbors Sam and Eva on their recent visit here a few weeks ago. They picked them up for Lily during our visit Dr. Spooky's Animal Museum in Deerfield. We went away and the first round of eggs all died. This time we have a little bugger who's about a month old, and he really looks prehistoric. These are not sea monkeys. Dave took a photo, I'll see if I can post it here.

Hope to see all my fine friends in the Slope tomorrow and beyond. There's lots to catch you up on here in the Happy Valley, including these cool things called sugar shacks that, Brigadoon-like, only open during maple sugaring season in late winter. People wait two hours for their pancake breakfasts. And something else called mud season that happens between winter and spring. I tell folks that in New York we either walk on snow on pavement or dirt on pavement. No mud. The parking area outside our house is a muddy lake. Definitely mud.