The winter that isn't

 Global warming, or living in the bull's eye on the dartboard with everyone else (in the Northern hemisphere) freezing?  Its hard to know - when you're living on a postage stamp and can't step off.  So what approach makes most of this varicoloured cell?  I've been wildly on the straight and narrow to deal with work volume and stress.  Its the best approach for me.  You could summarize it as lots of exercise, trying for lots of sleep, and those occasional beautiful conversations, the ones that are hard to plan for.  I opened The Daily Maverick today (in between hawked up chunks of spin that I'm trying to write... a communication strategy - itself rather more than a euphemism) and saw "Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it's always event." ~ Ursula Le Guin.  So true.  Is reading fiction speech?  Whose conversation is it that one hears in the mind's ear. I'm ready for a killer book, having sucked up a few false starts of late.

We had a visitor, the son of a lovely colleague of Ange's; she had to be somewhere and he needed a place to do his online school.  Euan. Which is the same derivative as Evan.  He was so sweet; shy-seeming, initially, but with fast and smart eyes, reading the room and the people.  Ange asked him whether he wanted to work in Aiden's room, or at the dining room table ... or outside on the Patio.  He decided in a flash.  I left him the binocs in case there was an interesting boat or two.  Holly joined him in the sun, and did a tour through his legs, brushing that cat-ghostly-affection.

This morning I was out on Blue - been running mostly of late - it was wonderful.  I caught the dawn over Po Toi O riding crushing hill loops, but it was pretty, with the smoke of fires warming the parts that the sun hadn't reached.  Lot's wife still.