Blooms, stars, microseconds.
Tuesday, May 26th, 2020
I mentioned developing blooms on apple trees as a measurement of time’s passage, which, when I live in a world surrounded with very precise digital time measurement, seems like a very very imprecise choice.
And when you’re counting on the cycles of things biological, you have to factor in all the stuff I really don’t understand, like rainfall amounts and sunshine and well, truth be told I can’t tell you that all the apple trees in an orchard will be fully a-bloom on precisely May 29th, nor can I assert the lupine will display in lovely wisteria-like purple on June 7th. Beats me. Some years it’s one way, other years it’s another.
I could, of course, go out at night and look at a subset of nature that is less affected by the small stuff like moisture and light. I’m talking about the stars. And heck, I have right here on my phone this great planetarium-y app that uses my precise orientation and location to tell me all I need to know about the alignment of stars, planets, comets, International Space Stations.
Of course that is the cheatingest form of cheating to do that, because it’s using satellites and trigonometry and the secret sauce of GPS to figure out exactly what field I’m out standing in.
So I suppose I need to be honest with myself. Self: it’s the end of May. You’ve got data. You’ve got resources. You don’t have any novel coronavirii (I think.) And when I hit ‘publish’ on this post, the exact moment in time will be entered, logged, memorialized in a fancy SQL database along with these words. It’s all fine.
My finger’s headed toward the button.