I am sitting in my chair. It is 19 November 2024, and the time is 3:57 PM EST. The sun is shining through my eastern window onto the wall to my left, forming an offcentered square. Its shape is highly irregular and it is shifting constantly, with the edges shimmering and seeming to sway slightly to and fro. I can feel that the sun is an amazing, powerful light, and that the atmosphere is like water, pushing on and distorting this beam until it looks like it is cast from a candlelight. For a moment the square settled into a regular shape, with the edges showing themselves naturally to be a bit blurred, but consistent. This didn't last, and forces beyond my reckoning once again begun to badger this light. The square now is lightly flickering in intensity, and there seems to be a sort of marbling to the luminosity passing across the surface. I know it is meant to snow tonight, and I wonder if there are large amounts of ice crystals in the sky causing these distortions.
A couple of nights ago I looked at the full moon, and for the first time in a significant while I saw a moondog: a strange phenomenon that is caused by ice crystals suspended high in the atmosphere, refracting the moon's rays and creating small, dimple-like lights on either side of the main body. Moondogs are supposedly far more intense in the far-northern hemisphere, especially up in the tundras and glacial flats in the upper Nunavut Region. This is only one of many reasons why it's a big dream of mine to visit this land of ten-thousand lakes.
The sun-square looks far brighter and generally more consistent now. I can actually sense the direct beam on my left eye, though I'm not looking at it. The square is broadly illuminating, casting a light-shadow on my keyboard and hands. It's very slightly more orange than before, and the edges are slightly less fuzzy. I can also see light peeking through slits in the half-lowered blinds of the window, which were far less visible moments ago, presumably due to the arc of the sun. The slits are not forming distinct lines on the wall as one might expect, but instead they make these heavily striated bars, where individual strands of shaded areas are dancing up and down and weaving within each other. Finally, I can see subtle rows of globby, uncertain spheres where the holes in the blinds are, within which are woven the hang-strings to suspend the slats. Every orb in the row displays as a near-perfect duplicate of every other in its set, projecting tiny dots, twigs, shaded portions, with random changes moving not once but more than ten times simultaneously.
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I took my pet snake Millie out of her enclosure for the first time in a few weeks. I don't like to get her out so she isn't stressed out, but I also know it's valuable for her to get some time around people. I worry that these long times will pass and she will become hand-shy or even aggressive. But she is always a good snake. Best pet I've had, really. Even my pet frogs have bitten me more than once...
I draped her over my shoulders, and pretty quickly she wrinkled up into my warm neck. I put on "Every Day is Halloween" from Ministry and danced with her. "Well, I live with snakes and lizards/ and other things that go bump in the night..."