I turned the corner and was struck by what lay before me overhead in a midnight blue sky, amber streets lights setting the stage, the backdrop, the frame, obliterating all else, hanging in the sky amidst a sweep of spooky clouds hung the full moon, well before dawn on my way to work the other morning.

It was a catch your breath, dang why don’t I ever remember to bring my camera with me, but thank gawd I’m here right now to see this sort of moon. So I stopped at the curb to admire it a bit longer, noticing the halo, and the rainbow colours, and put my mitts on as it was something like -2 C, or 28.4 F for you American’s, yah, it was cold. It was gawd damn beautiful. It was… stunning.

All along my ride, the image flashed in my mind, the mystery and magic of the moment, the thankful feeling of getting a bike in the first place, riding to work, giving myself this incredible gift, this rare thing that I sometimes see only because it’s 5:30 AM.

With age, I have settled into myself, to my patterns, my likes and dislikes, and I have learned a lot from many endings and that life moves pretty fast.

“Let’s swim to the moon
Let’s climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side.” 
 Jim Morrison

Anywho, decided as a break from the tyriads and rants, mobs and snobs, and caravans, death and taxes, I’d for a change post a little tour of my pad as it is today.

Or, rather, the main room of my pad, which I divided into two parts, one side for an entranceway, for storage of bikes, and Fred, who has to move inside now that the weather has turned colder.

The other side divided off for slumber and lounging whilst binge watching Time Team.

My rogues’ wall is the first thing you see. Well, and Fred, the giant Ficus Benjamina taking up a 4-foot radius in front of the window is hard to miss.

Welcome to my pad.

These photos are of what I pompously to myself refer to as The Great Room, with its 10-foot ceilings, orange walls, and big Victorian farmhouse windows, even a transom over the door, with a beautiful soft northern light all year streaming in.

When this was a working house at the turn of the century that room would have been what was called a “back kitchen”, or rather the only kitchen where any cooking happened, where things where stored, and laid out for dinner. I know this because my closet is this steep and winding staircase that is closed off, and again we have one just exactly like it back in Dodge, and they are called back kitchens.

Oh, and of course I have a small 3-piece ensuite, or a Garderobe as one would have named such a place in Medieval times, I do have one of those, all decked out as, of course, a turn of the century beach hut (keeping with the theme), even have a funky coloured lizard too – but anywho, on with the little tour.

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.” 

James Joyce, Ulysses