Solstice

Arrived at work late this morning: it was 8 AM and the sun, the first sunrise after solstice, was just lighting up the downtown skyscrapers and the upper slopes of the West Hills. I went upstairs to the cafeteria, whose picture windows face east, and soaked up a few minutes of light. Now it's uphill all the way to Midsummer.

Last night we went to see Tintin. Tintin wasn't a huge feature of my childhood (not like Lord of the Rings: yes, I've been swooning over the new Hobbit trailer, and yes, we saw it on the big screen last night), but I'm fond of it nonetheless. And what an excellent movie! Can't remember the last time I had that much fun. I always suspected Snowy was really the Brains of the Outfit, and it seems Spielberg agrees with me.

Wandering around Lloyd Center before and after, we ran into not one but two former co-workers of mine; one was attending the same movie. Much as I'm not fond of malls in general and indoor malls in particular, Lloyd is a good place to run into people.

December has been almost completely dry, foggy at night and frosty in the mornings. Our quince saplings have finally, grudgingly, condescended to allow their leaves to yellow. I suspect they're responding to the daylength rather than to the actual weather: after all, they're native to Central Asia and officially cold-hardy to some ridiculous figure like 20 below zero. Put your ear to their slender trunks and you can hear the howl of Kazakh wolves racing the December winds across the frozen steppe.

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