Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

kaberett gave me "Haematite, trains, clouds."

I associate hematite with roadnotes, who had a necklace of hematite chips. She also had a similar-shaped necklace of myrrh; I have a necklace of amethyst beads of that shape, which I don't think I've worn in this century.

Trains certainly aren't something I don't know or care much about. I started taking the subway alone, daily, before my twelfth birthday, in order to get to school. Sometimes I stood between cars on the (#7) elevated trains (shown in this userpic), even when there was room inside the subway cars. People in their early teens don't have a good grasp of mortality, but I did stop leaning on the subway car doors after a few well-publicized incidents of doors opening while the train was in motion between stations. I have been to railroad museums on three different continents, including two or three in the United States (depending on whether the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, which I recommend, counts as a railroad museum). And this reminds me that I've been meaning to go ride on the Mattapan Trolley since before I actually moved to Massachusetts.

Clouds can be very pretty, and eye-catching even when they're not pretty. My favorite skies to look at lately are the bright blue skies of sunny days with a few white clouds shining against them. That somehow reminds me that one of the ways people on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom would reply to really out-there assertions was "what color is the sky on your planet?" And one day I realized that if I was asked that, seriously, the answer would be "all of them." Mostly shades of blue or gray during the day, and gray or black at night, but the sky contains all the colors of the visible spectrum, in all sorts of shades and combinations. (That's not a new discovery, of course, but it's not something most people think about much.) Come to think of it, the cloudy sky at night is different color than it used to be, since there are fewer sodium-vapor lamps.