Everything's tight on this one

She looked so young to have been wearing such a tight facelift! But maybe she wasn't as young as I thought; hard to tell, with such surgery. It seems my Friday fashion photography is becoming limited to stealth snaps of tourists; they're the only ones usually wearing anything interesting enough to notice. And in fact this outfit isn't even all that interesting; it's just the most unusual thing I saw all night. Oh well – there's always next week!


Here is another dusk image from the skyline series of camera phone pictures I've been collecting. I've realized that this is my favorite time of day right now – those few minutes where you think it's finally gotten too dark to see, but then you look at the horizon and realize there's still just a thin rim of light still shining up from beyond the curve of the planet. I love watching that light disappear – and then there's another few minutes after that, as your eyes adjust to the dark, when you can start to see that there's actually a lot still visible in the darkness, as well.

This brings to mind one of my favorite poems:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

I love taking Tater on long walks at night, in dark places – like our road, which has no artificial lighting except people's porch lights, few and far between. In contrast to the daytime, when I never know who might be watching me, at night I feel safe and protected. I suppose in a way it's like a child who covers her eyes and says, "Now you can't see me!" But I feel comforted by the darkness all the same.

It's funny I should come around to feeling this way. As a child I was terrified of the dark. I remember making my parents promise to leave the hall light on, and to make sure I was sound asleep before they went to bed.


I also went to a bike festival last weekend. The turnout was fairly small, but I saw a lot of friends and some very cool bikes, and got to test-ride several different weird new concept bikes including my first-ever recumbent and a semi-recumbent three-wheeler built like a scaled down La-Z-Boy recliner.


This guy was my favorite thing all day. I love this contraption for carrying a large dog – or any other cargo – on the back of a bike, using the tray from an old metal wheel barrow. I wanted to ask him to stop so I could see how he attached it to the bike, but he never slowed down, just kept riding up and down the venue with the dog in the back, and I was too shy to try to flag him down.