First day of school and I'm already failing

It was Sadie's first day of Grade 9.  Thankfully, I don't think watching Wrath of Khan is gonna cause her probs in math.

What Are We Living For?

Empty Space:

There were two kingdoms only:

the first of them threw out both him and me.

The second we abandoned.

Under a bare sky

I for a long time soaked in the rain of my body,

he for a long time rotted in the rain of his.

Then like a poison he drank the fondness of the years.

He held my hand with a trembling hand.

“Come, let’s have a roof over our heads awhile.

Look, further on ahead, there

between truth and falsehood, a little empty space.”

Amrita Pritam.

Ticking Away the Moments That Make up a Dull Day

Everything is a conspiracy by the Illuminati to enslave us. Haven't heard a church bell in a while? Well that's cause the frequency of their ringing disrupts the New World Order's mind control rays so they got rid of them to keep us all under their control. It's so obvious! pic.twitter.com/KhT2Ooh49O

— Poker and Politics (@PokerPolitics) August 31, 2026

Well, back in Fletcher, Vermont, if you didn't hear the church bell ring, it was because I didn't wind the clock (happened a couple three times):

No conspiracy there, just forgetfulness...

PS - Brought the kids with me a few times on an individual basis.  They both thought it was cool, but Sadie was rather afraid of the rickety stairs and only went once.

Я жду ответа, больше надежд нету.

First day of school for both my high schoolers tomorrow! 

Gifts of Rain

I:

Cloudburst and steady downpour now
for days.
                 Still mammal,
straw-footed on the mud,
he begins to sense weather by his skin. 

A nimble snout of flood
licks over stepping-stones
and goes uprooting.
                          He fords
his life by sounding.
                         Soundings. 

Seamus Heaney. 

Launch Day

Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.

Cool launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope this morning (I was asleep):

There was another launch on this date in '84:

STS-41-D (formerly STS-14) was the 12th flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program, and the maiden flight of Space Shuttle Discovery. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on August 30, 1984, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on September 5, 1984. Three commercial communications satellites were deployed into orbit during the six-day mission, and a number of scientific experiments were conducted, including a prototype extendable solar array that would eventually form the basis of the main solar arrays on the International Space Station (ISS).

But wait, there's more!  Another in '83:

STS-8 was the eighth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on August 30, 1983, and landed on September 5, 1983, conducting the first night launch and night landing of the Space Shuttle program. It also carried the first African-American astronaut to go into space, Guion Bluford. The mission successfully achieved all of its planned research objectives, but was marred by the subsequent discovery that a solid-fuel rocket booster had almost malfunctioned catastrophically during the launch.

I'll ignore the "almost malfunctioned catastrophically" part and turn to John Young for a different danger:

The situation at launch on 30 August turned out to be quite dangerous. Five days earlier, a tropical storm hit the Florida coastline, making landfall just south of KSC. Forecasters had seen the storm coming two days beforehand, but there wasn’t the time to roll Challenger back from the pad. It had to sit there and ride out the storm. Even after the storm was out of the way, the weather caused trouble. Heavy thunderstorms with lightning were in the area. The crew was told they could “man” the shuttle if they wanted to—a risky decision and not one that should ever have been left for the crew to make.

But hey, the crew and vehicle survived, so nothing could possibly go wrong in the future...

A little voice inside my head said

“Don't look back, you can never look back.”

Métempsychose

Metempsychosis:

I believe in metempsychosis:
I wish I were a kettle,
A solfeggio, a rain of roses,
A lobster's caparison, 

A fat cat black and possessive,
The bear with the pale white of the pole
Or the old pensive elm
Sleeping, with a magpie on its shoulder, 

Or you, wavering beauty,
With your tender eyes and firm breasts,
At times docile and then haughty
Swollen with sap and pure blood, 

Or the black and yellow
Salamander at the bottom of a stump,
The Gartempe River or the Scamander,
The double kiss mouth to mouth 

Everything that lives, cries, sings and prowls
—The condor or the falcon,
The toad in the emerald
And the flame on the zircon, 

The pyre where Hercules crackles
The lark in the gonfanon wind...
—Or the tuber, if you prefer,
Hidden in the earth, nameless. — 

Maurice Fombeure.

QOTD

Plough Jogger:

The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it...

Happy Shays' Rebellion Day to all who celebrate. 

It happened one summer

I have long carried the memory of being awakened by this song on my clock-radio and having it running through my head all day at school.

First Known Use of the Word Was in 1880

Crematorium:

Where laurel hedges hide the coal and coke
   Our lawn-surrounded crematorium lies;
And every half-an-hour a puff of smoke
   Shows what we loved dissolving in the skies—
   Dear hands, dear feet, dear laughter-lighted eyes
And smiling lips which waited for a joke.

Now no one seems to know quite what to say:
   Friends are so altered by the passing years—
Well anyhow it’s not so cold today
   And thus we try to dissipate our fears.
I am the Resurrection and the Life!
Strong, sly, and painful, doubt inserts its knife.

John Betjeman.

Wanting things the way they used to be

You don't know what that can do to me.

Doomed to Repeat It

Learning from History:

They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,   

Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.

They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,   

Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.

I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,   

And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?

They said, my poets, singers of my song,   

We cannot tell, since all we tell you is

But history, we speak but of the dead.   

And of the dead they said such history

(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)   

As made of much of me a mystery.

David Ferry. 

#throwbackthursday

Mex and Kayla.  (2011)

Mex and Lola.  (2011)