A walk in the woods

R and I had to get away yesterday. Fortunately, getting away is easy: a 20-minute drive to R.B. Winter State Park and we were on (and off) the trails, encountering relatively few people (considering the holiday weekend).

We brought our cameras. I'm drawn mainly to surface texture and the play of light and shadow, so I'll take either super-close-up macro shots of leaves and lichen or, conversely, deliberately out-of-focus shots to convey (hopefully) more mood than content. The pic I'm posting today is of neither category: more like a snapshot, I guess.

It was a beautiful afternoon, nice and cool in the mountains, though the creek level was way down and the marshes were oddly devoid of the usual winged swarms--I can usually count on seeing iridescent gangs of damselflies, but found none.

We then drove south to the mall (utter contrast) in search of a decent floor lamp for my Lycoming office. There's a fairly old PC on my desk, and the screen flickers noticeably, but I think I can get used to that. I'm less accommodating toward the fluorescent lighting: I really do think that it triggers some of my headaches. I had one small table lamp left from the four-in-a-box we bought for my BU office, and someone left one of those little gooseneck desk lamps, which I set up on a shelf and adjusted to point up, but clearly a floor lamp was needed. After dragging R past every conceivable model at Lowe's, I settled on a basic brushed-chrome "3 light tree" for 25 bucks.

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Keystone Chapbook update: The contest is down to ten finalists. I shipped these ten manuscripts to the final judge on Thursday. Since the manuscripts are identifiable only by log number (cover sheets, acknowledgments, and bio information were removed as each manuscript arrived), I was thinking I'd post the log numbers of the finalists here. I know that not everyone is going to check this blog, but it's a good way to show a public record of the process at this stage but maintain the privacy of the writers' identities. (Authors were e-mailed their manuscript numbers as they were logged, and I deleted those e-mails immediately upon sending them). Any advice? The judge has a month to select the winning manuscript (and two runners-up). If you submitted your manuscript, would you want to know at this stage whether it was still in the running?

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The man is home from his morning jaunt. It's Sunday, and on Sundays we have migas. Yummy.