It's that time again

Time for snowbirds to gather and get the flock out'a here. Adios, Arizona; howdy, Colorado. So, for the next few weeks or more, we'll be giving this a rest.

Enormous undertakings

I was reading something the other day and came across the word enormously. It occurred to me right then that enormous was a word that I can never remember using. What increases my certainty that I have ignored this bit of text is that I keep wanting to spell it "enourmous," making it clear that I am not familiar with the proper spelling of a rather simple word.

I'm a bit nonplussed. See, right there! Certainly nonplussed is a less familiar term than enormous, but I must use nonplussed four or five times a year. So why don't I use enormous?

Hmm-mmm?

Let me check my thesaurus for synonyms: immense, vast, colossal, giant, gigantic, Amazonian, gargantuan, monumental, huge, towering. Well, there you go. None of those terms are that common to my writing, which makes me think that I seldom have cause to discuss enormous things. Or gargantuan things, or colossal things. Maybe once or twice a year I might mention something huge or gigantic, but maybe not, either.

Okay, then. Mystery solved.

Still...

A colossal giant with a gargantuan single

eye in the center of his immense forehead
is about to crush the monumental Sydney

Opera House with his enormous left hand.

Eh, I don't care much for opera, anyway;
it's all such a huge bore.

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Time and again

Outside the Navajo Reservation, which occupies the majority of the state’s northeast quarter, Arizona, for whatever arcane reasons, remains on standard time throughout the year. This means there are no spring-forward, leap-back resettings of all the clocks twice a year.

It also means that I easily and simply can track dawn and dusk, sunrise and sunset as they migrate gradually back and forth in a steady correlation between clock and calendar.

I always resent it when those seasonal fluxes are thrown off by our national obsession with time of the clock, or o’clock, as we abbreviate it—to save time, I suppose. I don’t really have a problem with either daylight savings or standard time; I just resent the change in relation to nature.

    This female (?) coyote has been
hanging around outside the RV park
fence lately. Despite my gender
guess, I call her Bob due to her
missing tail.
    I suspect she's interested mostly
in the dogs that Park guests like to
take for walks in the same area--her
interest is more likely culinary than
companionship. Photo by Lynn Gainie

Time is such a bizarre thing, anyway. But I’m discussing that this week in my Deep Space blog, a continuation of an essay I began last week, so I guess I won’t get into it here.

While in Arizona, I especially enjoy the nearly imperceptible creep of daylight as it heralds the change of winter to summer. But I enjoy many seasonal markers; for instance, I like to celebrate solstices and equinoxes as personal holidays in every season and I usually plan some manner of outdoor activity on those days.

On the not-so-pleasant side, these lengthening days also happen to correspond to climbing temperatures here in Tucson. We’ve already seen temps in the upper 90s and it would be my fond wish to escape back to Colorado before they get any higher. If Daylight Savings Time could help with that, I might feel differently about adjusting my clocks.

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