Weaving a Tapestry Without Fabric

I managed to weave the following components into a productive and enjoyable day:

• Solar powered driveway lights.
• Birthday party for a seven-year-old boy.
• Face mask intended to block silica dust from entering my lungs.
• Wine.
• Jack Daniels Old Number 7.
• New shower head with extension hose.
• Cici’s Pizza.
• An exploration of wind, its properties, and the lingo associated therewith.
• Fifty pages of the Reader’s Digest book, Crafts & Hobbies: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creative Skills.
• Six kinds of sushi rolls.

Obviously, a reasonably short post cannot possibly explain all this in narrative form, so I’ll be imprecise and brief, and will leave big chunks out.

My pottery course instructor invited her students and friends to a birthday party at Cici’s Pizza for her seven-year-old son; his birthday was a few days ago, but he was with his father (they are separated) then.  If he had a party, it was unimpressive.  So, she whipped one up at the last minute.  Most of the guests (there were 20-25, I’d guess) were pottery people.  The kid had a blast.  He and his sister were born in China and adopted by instructor and her estranged husband not too long ago; they are delightful kids.

Now, as to the 50 pages of Reader’s Digest, they are from a book I bought for two dollars at a book sale organized as a fundraiser for the Village chapter of the American Association of University Women. I think I should recommend those pages as the primer for the beginning (and even second year) pottery course.  It’s exceptionally valuable basic information, stuff the text we were assigned for the course either ignores or skips over completely.  I think the text is better suited to more advanced students; the Reader’s Digest extract is exceptionally well-done as an introductory basic piece.

The lights and the face mask and the shower head were Lowe’s-inspired and unimpressive, so I’ll leave them unattended.  As for the exploration of wind, let me tell you, it’s the stuff of legends!  It’s the kind of thing any child could have adopted as a passion, if only exposed to it with the right teacher.  The right teacher(s) are vital to intellectual development, methinks.  I had some good ones and, obviously, I had some misfits.  I wish the misfits had not been so prevalent; I might have turned out more intelligent, more well-rounded, and an all-around better person.

But back to wind. It was a simple question, so I asked Father Google  to tell me about wind (in the meteorological realm); what it is, how it is formed, whether there are different types, etc.  I understood the basics of wind, as we all do, but I was curious and wanted to know a little more.

Father Google expounded on wind in his usual fashion, waxing poetic and leading me down dozens of pathways that led to more questions and more pathways. Ultimately, I left the search exhausted but enlightened and with an even more intense interest than when I had started.

I learned that meteorologists (and others) classify winds in a number of ways, one of which is in accord with a scheme that names them based on speed or strength, their direction, and/or their duration. Short bursts of high-speed wind are called gusts when roughly parallel with the earth’s surface; very high-speed bursts of high-speed winds perpendicular to the earth’s surface, directed downward, are downdrafts.  Long duration winds are classified according to their strength, from breeze to gale to hurricane to tornado (which is relatively short-term, but not compared to a gust). Wind may arise from local differences in temperatures between the earth’s surface and the air mass above it or by differences in rates of absorption of solar energy between terrestrial climate zones.  And, of course, the density of air between adjoining areas can trigger inflows or outflows of air masses, AKA wind.

A single paragraph cannot begin to explain the complexities of wind.  Nor can a single paragraph begin to explain why I felt like a switch had been flipped on my wind-interest meter to cause me to seek information about wind.

Yesterday was interesting; it felt like a full day should feel.  It felt a little like I’d woven bits and pieces of scraps and cast-asides into a relatively strong web that would keep me easily afloat through the night and into this morning.  And it appears, from the look of things, it worked.