I love that they finally installed a proper "walk/don't walk" sign near my little office building. The former version featured an artistic use of non-image, such that it neither showed "walk" nor "don't walk", except in intermittent, non-predictable ways. Usually, it showed a gnomic lightlessness--a mystery waiting to be unraveled.
When I walk to Boston Market now, a block or so to my east, I'm able to enjoy not only "walk" and "don't walk", but one of those technologically satisfying "you can walk now, for 12, 11, 10...seconds" "sorta walk" blinking symbols that just makes life so orderly. No more need I wonder if the large button on the intersection power pole is actually hooked up to anything. Now theorems receive direct proof, as a punched button equals to an illumined light. I no longer wonder if I need read a statement out loud that crossing signals are only a theory, and there are significant gaps and omissions in their elaboration.
Walking comes easy right now, as we continue to have unseasonably warm days, with peak highs in the 80s. This roughly exceeds the customary temperature by some twenty five degrees. Such good weather comes as a real surprise, because December started out with a cold shiver. The result is a pleasing kind of sensory mismatch. The landscape says "December" but the temperature says "late April".
This final week of the year continues to be busy, but I like the way the telephone recedes in importance on "holiday weeks". It rings, it is true, but less like a handbell choir and more like a holiday tree ornament. I am inclined to believe that few angels get their wings due to the ringing of law office telephones.
The wintertime becomes the season of year-round birds and unlikely visitors. Kestrels, red-tail hawks, crows, pigeons, killdeer and some heron all stay. Some robins stay, and some go. Flocks of birds, seemingly uncertain should they stay or should they go, make arcs and circles in formations more impressive than any line of German skiers. I want to go to a lake where one can see migrant bald eagles from barges. I find in life, though, that I learn about such boat rides by reading in the paper how they took place last weekend.
Holiday cards continue to arrive, to my delight, as did my order of jaws harps. I find that I am only good so far at making a single note on a jaws harp, and I am not certain, if I were choosing, that the particular note is the one that I would choose. Still, the harp comes in a little cardboard boxlet that features the Peanuts character Snoopy, which certainly adds to its solemnity and allure. I ordered four for some reason--perhaps I have an id-burned desire to play in a jaws harp quartet. I think they were just so inexpensive, although fortunately when I bought a nose flute I was able to avoid the temptation to buy 100, notwithstanding the allure of the inexpensive. I bought two, of course--because once one has played one, one will want to give one away.
I like days like today,when the things I need to do are before me, and all I need to do is to do them.