Bull Run Park

A few photos from Bull Run creek.

A lazy reach for October

It is almost October again.

I can't say that it's more so than last year, or even less so.

It is different.

The oppression of the heat has let up, but the humidity shows little signs of giving in. Everything is moist to the touch. Towels won't dry. Car seats feel damp to sit in. Counters stay damp for hours. The house smells of decay. The forest is filled with mushrooms, and mold grows shamelessly on dead leaves.

The attic fan is rumbling, sucking cold morning ick around my ankles. I sit at breakfast, trying to read papers, but they are almost moist enough to be soggy, and sag in my hands, making reading from one hand a challenge. My cereal grows soggy too.

It's clear autumn is creeping in. The trees are taking on color. It's dark too late and then too soon. We took rakes out and dredged up the early leaves smattering the yard. A wet, sticky job that pissed off the spiders. Where will we put the Halloween decorations?

Autumn takes so long here, just like it did in New Hampshire. Growing up, there was about a week, maybe two when the aspens suddenly turned yellow and dropped their leaves. About that time it would start to snow. That was the cue that it was going to be pretty cold for the next 8 months or so. In my mind, to casual memory, Colorado is always winter.

The chill is making me miss the coffee shops in New England.

So, this is where they made Pyridine...

We were driving around the hilly region to the Northeast of New York City, looking for our hotel in Central Valley. We had, by that point, missed the turn a couple of times. Things were going swell, by which I mean swelling with impatience.

Suddenly, suburbs and stripmalls gave way to a brief flash of industrial decay: heavy rail, rust, smokestacks, distilling towers. Big stone buildings. What was that? We made a note to do a followup investigation the next day.

That was the (now defunct) Nepera Chemical Company. Apparently caught by tightening environmental regulations, it closed in the 2000s. It's nearby disposal area is now an EPA Superfund Site. It appears to be crumbling while it waits to be transformed into suburbs and strip malls.

We stopped to take pictures from outside the fence, and admire how entropy takes over things.

Of course, you'll have to ask someone else what it looks like inside.

Spring Flashback

 The part of photograph that I find stressful is sitting at the computer later on and figuring out what photos are worth keeping and then filing them away so that I can find and view them again at some point in the future. Additional stress comes from photos that I think would look better after manipulation. That's not always very fun, and is often slow (at least, on a dual ghz G4 mac...).

Joy is finding something sincerely beautiful that you forgot that you took.