Taylor and I took another walk this morning, this time farther into the KSU campus. Again, I was on foot, and he on his new bike. And of course I had the new camera with me. I took a few pictures of Anderson Hall, but I wasn't satisfied with the composition or the exposure. I was most disappointed in the color. The great, sweeping lawn that leads to Anderson Hall was tan, nearly the same tan as the limestone of the building, and I am craving color! I've inserted a picture of a turret on Holton Hall instead. Of course, the sky here isn't that blue, but the roof of the turret is that red. And on winter days here, most of the world is the tan of that limestone in the picture, so the eye seeks variation anywhere it can find it.

When this vacation began for me, I had plans to get massive amounts of reading done. Although I'm keeping up with the reading I need to do for work, I'm somewhat disappointed in the choices I've made for the entertainment/enrichment reading I had in mind. I wanted to read William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth and I wanted to re-read Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Those were at the top of the list. I've skimmed parts of the Heat-Moon in the past, because it's about this region, and because I know some of the folks who play a significant role in it. But I've never read the book through. And the Tuchman work is just a masterpiece of imagination and historical reconstruction, one that I hope to read several more times. There's also a three-volume set of Remembrance of Things Past that molders on the shelf. Although I know folks who have read Titus Andronicus, I'm beginning to think I might be one of the folks destined never to get there. Sorry, Will. And there was some more John McPhee I wanted to have a go at over the holiday. Re-reading Didion's Salvador would thrill me again, I suspect.

I still have hope that I'll get to all those and more eventually.

But not this month apparently. Instead, I'm reading Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, my dirty little secret. Just sit back, put your mind on cruise, and read for plot, plot, plot. Even though the plot, the outcome and the paranoia are predictable, transparent, and simplistic, I love him anyway.

At our latitude, the sky becomes dark at about 5:30 PM in winter. Tonight, at around 5 PM, Owen and Taylor spotted an owl in the neighborhood and followed it up the hill north of us. Of course, they couldn't keep up with its location for long, but seeing one owl whet their appetites for more, so they asked to go owling after dinner.

After supper we drove to the KSU forestry area, a few acres of tall pines where we have found owls and their pellets in the past. We saw no owls on this December night. Taylor mistook the barking of a distant dog for an owl's hoot, and Owen mistook the quiet hiss of a car's tires on concrete for the whooshing sweep of an owl's wings. Although we saw no owls, the sky was clear and the stars were bright, so we lay back on a pine-needle bed and watched stars for a bit. I can identify the big and little dippers, and Orion, of course, and I can find Polaris, our temporary North Star. But after that, all combinations of stars organize themselves to my eye as Cassiopeia. That's the "W" shape, isn't it?

Still, they didn't mind. But when I tried to explain that the North Star was not the North Star when the pyramids were being built, they both imitated snoring noises on cue, reminding me that this was supposed to be a right-brained activity. They're on vacation too, after all.

For future consideration: Why isn't "whole 'nuther" a word? It is so handy.

An extraordinarily warm day for this time of year. 63 F. on our thermometer at 2 PM.