Winter Approaches

Night time lows have been in the 30s of late but have stayed above freezing. Last night the temperature fell into the 20s, so I gave in and turned on the oil heat. This morning, as the sun lit up the eastern sky I looked out and saw that the world outside was covered in frost. Well, my small piece of the world, anyway. Warm weather isn’t gone for good – next Wednesday will be about 70°, they say – but winter is announcing itself. It’s around the corner. For some reason, I am reminded of a conversation from  the movie Groundhog Day. In the movie, Phil, a TV weatherman (Bill Murray), is leaving his room at an inn when he encounters a man (Ken Hudson Campbell) in the hallway.

Phil: “Buon giorno, signore.”
Man: “Think it’s going to be an early spring?”
Phil: “Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on his smiling face a dream of spring. Ciao!”

That’s all we can do when winter arrives: hibernate, and dream of spring. If you’re wealthy, you can jet to your villa in Provence and enjoy the breezes off the Mediterranean. If you’re semi-wealthy, you can hop a plane to New Providence Island and enjoy the trade winds while you cavort in one of the pools at the Atlantis. (Yes, I’m aware that the Atlantis resort is on Paradise Island, not New Providence, but there’s no airport on Paradise Island so you have to fly to Nassau and take the bridge over to … oh, heck, you’ll figure it out when you get there.)

I haven’t posted a blog for a week now, but it’s not because I haven’t been writing. In fact, I have been writing. I’ve been writing a new piece of software, and I find that writing code is a good outlet for my creativity. I enjoy coding. I start with nothing and soon I have a program, and it does things – or, more accurately, it allows you to do certain things more easily because it exists. And then I think of a feature that would be useful, and I add it. Then another feature, then another. I have to guard against the lure of rampant featuritis. It’s easy to get sucked into that.

There is a strange time distortion when I’m writing code. I’ll sit at my computer and it’s the middle of the day. After what seems like a few minutes, I’ll notice it’s dark outside. That’s when I realize hours have gone by. When I’m in deep concentration, I’m in a zone, and time passes much faster outside the zone than inside. It’s the opposite of smoking weed, where you put a frozen dinner in the oven and then go listen to music or watch TV or chat with friends, and after what seems like an hour you suddenly remember the dinner and you think, “Oh my god, that dinner is burnt up by now,” and you run to the kitchen and yank open the oven door, only to find that the dinner is still frozen – because it has only been five minutes since you put it in the oven. (Not that I know anything about weed.) It's like the Indonesian phrase made famous by Harlan Ellison: Djam Karet – “the hour that stretches.” (Not to be confused with Djam Karet, the progressive rock band.)

But back to winter. This is the time of year when fall foliage colors are near their peak in the mountains of Virginia. When I lived in the mountains, I lived on a tree-lined street that, for a couple of weeks every fall, would be arched over by limbs of ancient trees holding leaves of flaming reds and yellows. The leaves fell to the road below and made it a Technicolor road. I still see it in my mind’s eye. I probably took a photo of it, a photo in which the colors never appear as brilliant and alive as they do in real life. If I did take a picture, that picture is now as lost as the other hundreds of photos I’ve taken along the timeline of my life. I still see them in my head. Your brain is the ultimate archive for images; it saves the best ones and it saves them in living colors – colors that are likely better than reality ever was.

The day is warming up fast. It looks like the temperature will hit today’s prediction of 61°. I may have to take a walk, maybe drive to a park and see if I can find something photo-worthy. ‘Til next time.