Maybe it’s the winter weather, but I’ve been doing a boatload of knitting. The great thing about knitting is that it automatically makes you feel productive. You spent all that effort moving needles around, and see? A product! You cannot be accused of completely wasting your time.

In addition to the fingerless mitts, which I totally improvised the pattern for while learning how to use two circular needles to knit in the round, I have made innumerable neck-scarves and lacy things, many of which still need to be blocked because I am a slacker. These days, I use published patterns mainly for inspiration: to pick up a new shaping idea or learn a new stitch.

I love the mitts, though. They’re a little more time-consuming to make than I’d prefer, but they’re surprisingly warm and they have garnered much more favorable comment than I’d have expected. (I sincerely wish that these photographs didn’t make my hands look like dessicated, deformed mummy-paws, but you can’t have everything.)

When I think of the wealth of human ingenuity that has been invested in the machinery of war, I am appalled. And yet I also find myself feeling vaguely optimistic.

Why?

Because I believe that, slowly—too slowly, to be sure—but nonetheless surely, war is losing its appeal as a way of exerting power and influence. In part, this is because our weapons have become so effective. Our technologies in other areas are allowing us to live long and relatively healthy lives, and we are therefore now much less tolerant of anything that would bring us to an untimely end.

We need to muster the same urgency and intensity of invention and innovation in addressing other problems that we used to devote to improving means of slaughter. We need an arms race in green energy, for example. We need competitive escalation in techniques for learning and communicating.

As always with human beings, the question will be: can our ingenuity and our evolving understanding overcome the problems created by our flaws as a species before we wipe ourselves out.

My first attempts with this image involved preserving the ultra-blue of the sky and trying to boost the yellows, reds, and greens of the foliage and earth. I ended up with a nice-enough photograph, but one that said nothing, that aroused no lingering interest in me.

On a whim, and mostly just because I felt I ought to eat my own dog-food, advicewise, I looked at it in black-and-white. And just like that—*BAM*—I fell in love with this picture. I took away the pretty and I was left with the stark, the harsh, the unforgiving beauty of this landscape.

Can you feel how cold it was in the shadows and how warm in the sunlight? Can you see how the city vanishes, as if it were never there at all?

Please look at the larger version in the Gallery. I wish I could print this large enough to hang over a sofa.