No Vember

Well, it looks like I went a whole month without posting anything to the blog. How'd that happen? Well, first I had the flu, then I was lazy, then I was some more lazy, then I was traveling, then it was December.

Having that break for Thanksgiving in there really does lop off the tail of the month somehow. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that April is the cruelest month; maybe he should have written a seminal modernist poem about how November is subjectively the shortest.

But you, November, how long do you last? /
Not for 31 days can you enjoy /
all the rotting pleasures of the calendar year!
[Untitled workplace doodle, 11/2009]

More visual artifacts from November? Here's a blue heron that briefly shared a patch of river walk with Kyle and me in Chattanooga, where we spent the week of Thanksgiving with some of her father's side of her family:

He's a bird.

And here's Kyle trying, just slightly in vain, to point out the very peak of Mt. Adams visible to the north of the Columbia Gorge, as seen from Mitchell Point last weekend (an hour east from Portland on I-84, probably the most scenic interstate highway in the country):

Just a little lower...

Beautiful clear day, last Sunday, and from 1,000-plus feet the river valley here, like Ithaca, is gorge[ou]s. I will note that the path along the ridge line up there, while quite wide in objective, rational terms, still rated maybe a 4 out of 10 on my irrational discomfort with heights scale.

There! My November is documented now! I actually had one!