Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Saturnalia Saturnalia begins today. This year Saturn presides over the beginning of his holiday season. Look to the west at about 5:30pm. Saturn will be sitting just above the crescent Moon. In the north, this is also the beginning of the shortest nights of the year. For the next ten days, day length in my… Continue reading The Daily: 17 December 2023
I never used to be afraid of the weather. Weather happened. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Sometimes it could be destructive and scary. I've lived through hurricanes and tornados and blizzards and heat waves that set the bosque on fire. For all those things, I made sure to be as prepared as possible. Open the window… Continue reading The Daily: 11 December 2023
The Winter Sleep Moon enters its second quarter today at 5:50am. This is the waxing gibbous phase. Its half circle face is also sitting very close to Saturn tonight at about 6pm. There are also a few other night sky things that are worth mentioning. Venus, as a morning star, is still amazingly brilliant. Look… Continue reading The Daily: 20 November 2023
Early this morning, the Hunter's Moon went dark. I suspect that in the luna-solar calendars that tied the new year to the end of the growth season, this thirteenth dark moon in a solar cycle would have been considered New Year's Eve with the new year beginning with the sighting of the crescent moon and… Continue reading The Daily: 13 November 2023
Sunday the clocks all changed. No, I'll not use passive voice. Except for the Apple things in this house, the clocks do not change themselves. To spring forward and fall back, I have to wander around the house setting some dozen clocks, ranging from the phone system to the enormous wall clock in the dining… Continue reading The Daily: 6 November 2023
It is the first Friday and the third day of the eleventh calendar month, named for the ninth. It is two days before the last quarter of the last moon cycle in my wheel of the year, the Hunter's Moon. The growing season has ended here in Vermont with the hard finality of snow and… Continue reading The Daily: 3 November 2023
Today is All Hallows' Eve, Hallowe'en, the first night in the ancient new year's festival that Celtic language speaking people called Samhaine. We hardly remember that it was once a sacred festival, celebrating endings and beginnings, nor that it was "converted" by the Catholic Church into a day for honoring the dead. It's possible that… Continue reading The Daily: 31 October 2023
So the question of whether or not this house would be open for trick-or-treat business was answered for me. I spent Saturday doing most of the cleaning. I got all the rodent mess cleaned off the front porch in anticipation of making a spooky welcome out there. Nothing spooky about pumpkin rind gnawed up and… Continue reading The Daily: 30 October 2023
This is just a short, mostly small news brief for the week. But first the headline... Hurricane Otis made landfall over Acapulco, Mexico, yesterday morning. A hurricane in the eastern Pacific, where the coldest ocean waters are constantly upwelling, is singular enough. This is the strongest storm to hit the coast of western Mexico on… Continue reading The Daily: 26 October 2023
A Happy Mistake This weekend I discovered that if you accidentally pick up a quart of buttermilk and use that to make yogurt, you get a delicious cottage cheese and lots of whey. The funny thing about this mistake is that the kid at the check-out spent a long time trying to figure out how… Continue reading The Daily: 23 October 23
By My Solitary Hearth 