blowing out the holes

One o’those awesome churches in NYC

Today’s photo is part of my ongoing obsession with photographing dark holes in bright sunlight, trying to set the exposure so I get some of the detail inside the hole (a church interior, in this case) while blowing out (brightening too much) the outside, all sunlit. I think it’s fun.

Life goes on, here at ALH’s house… I like living here, but I think I cramp things for her, a bit. We’re on radically different sleeping schedules, right now. I wake up around 9 a.m. and she wakes up around 1 p.m. I go to sleep around 1 a.m. and she does the same around 4 a.m. It’s odd, but there are advantages, I suppose.

I’ve been reading a fun book (something I do almost exclusively on vacations like this one) that ALH got me for Xms. It’s called “The Years of Rice and Salt,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Alternate history, with the main premise that the Christians and the rest of Europe were completely destroyed by the plague in the 13th century or so, leaving Islam and the Chinese culture to conquer the world. It’s fun, but I do have some issues… For instance, the author seems to be heading for a world-peace-type situation by the year 2002 or so, implying that Christianity and Western civilization are the factors that have prevented us from doing this, so far. I guess it’s hard to argue with alternate history, though. But blaming Christianity for all the world’s ills is pretty much in vogue right now, so I doubt I’ll get much in the way of sympathy for my concerns. Not that I am blind to the atrocities committed, ostensibly in the name of God.

Other stuff: I’ve been busy working on a story. It’s lots of fun for me. I wrote it as a whole piece over a year ago, and I’ve simply been re-working it this year, in bits and pieces, as I have time. It’s been reworked a lot. I want to finish it before this vacation is over. I’m starting to understand the old phrase that there are no finished books, only abandoned ones. I think the anxiety of not knowing what the heck I’m doing is part of what keeps me from finishing. When I finish, I have to show it to someone (or I will, at least, “have to” or not).