It’s like there’s a fence between me and my goals some days…

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Photo #548: Stymied OstrichLocation Taken: National Zoo, Washington DC
Time Taken: March 2010

Siiigh. Some weeks the fates just conspire against me.

First there was that sun exposure headache a few days ago that wiped out some of my plans on Wednesday (not very detailed plans, or very plan-like plans, but still).

Then Thursday, I usually have a lovely Pathfinder game at the local game store, but there was a localized blackout that forced them to shut down for the night, so the game was canceled. It must have been a VERY localized blackout, since I live only two blocks from the game store, and my power was just fine.

And today, I had an ear infection. I get those fairly often, sadly enough. My ear is much better at letting in water than it is at letting it out again, so well, one inadvertent dousing in the shower is enough to clog my ear for a day or so, and has at least a fifty percent chance of triggering a minor ear infection a few days later. The water just sits there, trapped in whatever little corner it found, providing a lovely breeding ground for bacteria. I notice it when I get an ache in the head and a spreading radial pain that loves going down the tendons in my neck. With a bit of thought, I can localize the pain to the inner reaches of the ear, and I do have a rather nice ear drop bottle that’s quite effective at paring down the pain to just the infected spot itself. But it still takes an awful lot of energy for my body to clear out the infection, which at least it gets promptly onto doing once the pain gets localized down. In less than a day, the pain will stop and business as usual will resume.

It’s fairly noticeable when the infection finally clears. All of a sudden, I feel like I should get around to all the stuff I’d been putting off due to lack of energy. Alas, I can’t make up for lost time. I’d been planning to make up a batch of delicious pasties so I could have them for lunch at work, but that takes at least one hour to prepare and another to cook or so.  And well, it was pretty late in the day when the infection cleared. Guess I’ll just have to continue buying my lunch for another week.

At least I did get my laundry done. That was the one thing I absolutely had to do today.

I’m bad at these chore things, I really am…

  

Slivers of Silvery Shale Sitting Silently

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Photo #547: Shale SliversLocation Taken: Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: March 2010

I’ve been reading about rocks lately, so look at this lovely shale!

See how the rock has broken off in thin slivers? You only find that with rocks with a thin lamination. Oh wait, jargon. Really thin layers of rock all of the same type, breaks off easily into sheets. And, obviously, slivers. They’re each a few inches long, to give you scale.

This particular rock wall is right by the large Ithaca Falls. The water’s carved a small canyon into the shale hills, with steep cliffs made completely out of this fantastic shale. Shale’s a sedimentary rock, built up over long periods of time as more and more mud gets dumped on one spot, compacting the whole mass down until it fuses into rock. There’s all sorts of variables that make mud turn into shale versus mudstone versus sandstones versus all the other possibilities.

This, however, is a beautiful shale, and the combination of glaciers carving away the upper rock in the last ice age and waterfalls carving into the rock have made it marvelously visible for any to see.

  

The Brilliant Light of the Burning Day-Orb

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Photo #546: Bright SunLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

I had a headache today due to excessive sun exposure. Had to take a nap to give my body a chance to recover, hiding myself away from every source of light to speed up the process.

It’s not just a headache, mind you. It’s also a general lethargy and inability to think properly. I just stop really being productive at anything for several hours. It’s really subtle, and comes on slowly, and I only realize I’m experiencing the symptoms when I’m solidly in the midst of them.

The oddest part of my sunlight allergy is that the symptoms don’t trigger until a few hours after I’m done with the exposure that triggered the whole thing. I can finish up whatever chore it is that’s taking me outdoors just fine, and be well and thoroughly home and out of the sun, and then it will hit.

It took me a long time to figure out why I’d occasionally get these weird times of headache and lethargy. The key time was one day when I went biking and got a rather high dose of direct sunlight, including one five minute stretch where I was just sitting in the sunlight at a convenient bench waiting for my Mom to do an extra loop I didn’t feel up to. That night was the one and only time I’ve had a full migraine. After that key incident, I started checking the correlation patterns between sunlight exposure and headaches several hours later, and found a very strong pattern of the two going together.

Thanks to that delay, I’m suspecting it’s not the sunlight itself I’m allergic to, but one of the products the body makes using what it gains from sunlight. It’s not vitamin D, since I can (and do) take supplements of that with no difficulty at all. But there’s probably a whole host of chemicals the body makes using sunlight, not just the most famous one. Alas, all this is conjecture, and I have no real way to test for which exact substance is causing the allergic reaction.

Mind you, I’ve long suspected I had a sunlight allergy. For one thing, while people around me claim that sunlight feels good on their skin, to me it feels unpleasant. It’s not something I’d call painful, but it’s more like a constant prickling and a feeling that something’s not quite right in the exposed patches of skin. I like saying “I can feel the photons bouncing off my skin!” and that’s not too far from the truth. I’ve long had the lifestyle pattern of staying inside and loving cloudy or rainy days far more than sunny ones. I don’t get headaches from indirect or diffused sunlight. There’s probably just not enough of it to overload my system at those times.

These days, though, I continue to live in an area with large numbers of sunny days, and I can’t avoid all exposure. Today it was just what I got while driving in two half-hour stretches, and it wiped me out for about three hours in the evening. It can be quite irritating, especially since I don’t have an internal meter that says “this much sunlight is ok, but any more will be bad”. It’s not for several hours until I get feedback in the form of pain, which is a terrible way to learn how to avoid stuff for far too many reasons.

  

This is [INSERT FLOWER NAME HERE], isn’t it pretty?

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Photo #545: Generic FlowerLocation Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2010

…You know, after you post forty or so photos of flowers, writing the posts feels a bit repetitive.

This is a flower. I don’t know what kind. It’s a pretty color though.

Flowers are awesome, right?

…Yeah, that about sums it up.

Though this one does have a nice mix of textures to it, and the narrow focus I used worked rather well here.

Still don’t have a clue what type of flower it is, though.

  

Slip through the fog, my sweet, come to me as you will

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Photo #544: Easing FogLocation Taken: Alberta, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

Fog is just a cloud that’s come to visit, you know.

It slides gently down from the sky, eases down from the mountains, or just rises up from the ground, forming where it’s visiting. And soon the land is covered in gentle gray mists, hiding the far lands, revealing the splendor of the near.

Its cousin, rain, is often near, and can act quite similar at times. But you don’t find them together, for the rain crowds out the fog. But sometimes the rain brings the fog. On a hot day, where the sun has glared at the ground until it’s practically blushing, a sudden rainstorm will have an unexpected encore. As the water seeps into the hot ground, the ground heats it into a fine vapor, which rises back out again. And there, the ground fog spreads across the land, never rising high, just a sign of the dance of sun and rain.

Sunlight powers rain, but kills fog. The heat disturbs the delicate balance of water and air. Wind also tears it apart, and of course rain batters it down. Fog is strongest when it slips in like a thief in the night, turning the dark starry sky into a dark misty realm. The wind and rain are weaker at night, and the sun is powerless. But fog, it shines under the moonlight.