8.12.18 …” What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.” -JA

“Solvitur Ambulando” – It is solved by walking, 2018 Labyrinth Walks, Myers Park Baptist Church – Charlotte NC:

I’m really feeling the heat. And the heat, with singing bugs and the light breeze in the heat, seems to intensify my headache. I’m feeling very inelegant. So Jane Austen has inspired me here …

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

– Jane Austen

And I notice for the first time a Friendship Garden? How could I have missed it before?

So I had to ask, what am I hearing? From this, probably cicadas.

By their songs

If locality and season are taken into account, the call of a singing insect can be used to identify its species. However, it is sometimes difficult to judge which major category of singing insect is producing an unknown call. In difficult cases, you may need to locate the songster. Here are some guidelines that may help:

Cricket songs are musical to the human ear because their carrier frequencies are relatively pure and low.

Katydid and cicada songs sound buzzy, raspy, or whiney, because their carrier frequencies are less pure and are higher than those of crickets. Cicadas call almost exclusively during daylight hours and at dusk, usually from trees and shrubs, whereas most katydids call only at night and many are not resticted to woody vegetation.”

Source: Recognizing crickets, katydids, and cicadas,

http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/Walker/buzz/i00dis.htm

8.12.18

Thin places:

At the beach, I’m confronted with God’s creation on a grander scale. I look out across the ocean and realize that there’s another continent on the other side of this body of water, that underneath the waves are billions of life forms that we’ve only begun to understand and document, and that all of this is part of God’s creation. At the beach, I don’t feel overwhelmed by responsibilities; I feel overwhelmed by the beauty of creation. I feel free to read, stare at the waves and even nap! (I almost never nap, but the beach reminds me how wonderful that can be!) The beach is a thin place for me because it changes my attitude so that I am more open, at peace and better able to experience God.

Source:Finding God at the beach – The Presbyterian Outlook,

https://pres-outlook.org/2018/08/finding-god-at-the-beach/

NYPL, before we had the internet, librarians, libraries:

Before we each had a little, flickering encyclopedia in our hands, we had librarians, and they’re still experts at finding the answers to tricky questions. Through the Ask NYPL portal, a decades-old phone and text service, the staff has triaged everythingfrom queries about the Pope’s sex life to what it means if you dream about being chased by elephants. The library staff are ace researchers with a massive trove at their fingertips. A sense of mystery in their work comes when people approach them with vague questions and patchy details—particularly when they’re looking for books, but they don’t remember the authors or titles.

A few years ago, staffers in the New York Public Library’s reader services division drafted a blog post about how to track down a book when its title eludes you. This post spurred a follow-up, in which reader services librarian Gwen Glazer recommended library resources and a number of other strategies (among them are Goodreads groups, a sprawling Reddit thread called whatsthatbook, an indie bookseller in Ohio who is happy to poke around for a $4 fee). Thanks to Google—“how to find a book”—many stumped people seem to land on that post, and they have often written about their enduring puzzles in the comments section. The messages now number in the thousands. Glazer says she often arrives at work to see another 10 title requests.

Source, The Crack Squad of Librarians Who Track Down Half-Forgotten Books – Atlas Obscura , https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/librarian-detectives-forgotten-books

Thin places, NYPL, before we had the internet, librarians, libraries