Today is a gray, rainy day marked by a serious asthma attack this morning that kept me at home.  I’m going to spend the day relaxing and sucking on my nebulizer, but I also had to take a couple of pictures of the view from our new home.  I just happened to glance out the window and was struck by how pretty our neighborhood is.  I only took a couple of pictures because the battery in my camera is running low.

(Click on the pictures for full size versions.  The effect is better if you go to this entry on my blog instead of reading it through a feed reader or LiveJournal.  And for some reason the Lightbox script isn’t quite working right.)

First, here’s a picture of the street in front of our house, taken from the bay window in our living room.

I was really struck by the colors (which I think are sort of washed out in this picture).  It actually looks like it’s autumn around here, doesn’t it?  And, of course, Halloween is coming, which means some of our Halloween decorations are up as well.

I love Halloween; makes me think of ghosts, ghouls, zombies, werewolves, vampires, all that wonderful stuff.  Of course, as my mother was quick to point out recently, most holidays get me in that mood: Halloween, Christmas, Arbor Day.  You know how it goes.

This second picture is actually from our dining room window and looks into our neighbor’s back yard.  Nothing incriminating there, no worries:

Again, the colors, which are washed out in this picture, are just brilliant.

I love that we live in a neighborhood like this.  In Dixon (and Woodland and Davis before that), I never got to see such tree plumage from the houses I lived in.  In Dixon, our neighborhood was so new that none of the trees were big at all.  They were still scruffy puppy trees, determined to show their greenery all year round (except for our neighbors, who had an unhealthy attraction to palm trees).  Our new neighborhood is much older, dating back to the 19th century (it was annexed by Sacramento in 1911), so it’s had time to build up some character and some serious elm trees.  This makes me happy.

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I don’t know much about how the Nobel Prize committee works, and normally I don’t follow most of them, but there are at least two this year that struck me.

First, I was intrigued to see that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is significant because it’s the first time that I’ve actually read a book by a Nobel recipient while the author was still alive.  Technically, Doris Lessing is a science fiction writer, in that her novels almost always include elements that are science fiction-esque, but you won’t find her books in the science fiction section of the bookstore; they’ll be in the literature/fiction section.  I read one of her books once, but to be honest I couldn’t quite get it.  I found her style obtuse, dense, difficult, almost incomprehensible.  In short, it was Literature, with a capital L, and definitely Nobel Prize quality Literature.

Second, I was pleased to learn that Al Gore has received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming.  I’ve been impressed with Al Gore lately; I’ve always sort of admired him (my admiration tempered by the fact that he was still a politician), and now my admiration feels more justified, just like when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.  I’m interested to see how Gore’s award will be reported in, say, Fox News.  Will they note that the Nobel Prize Committee is filled with a bunch of left wing commie pinko radicals who also gave the Nobel Peace Prize to peacenik nuts like Jimmy Carter, Yassir Arafat, Aung San Suu Kyi, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King Jr., and others?  Or will they grudgingly admit that there might be something to this whole Global Warming thing after all?  Personally, I’m expecting the former.  There are still a lot of folks out there who see this whole global warming thing as a conspiracy against American business interests (how this logic works I’m simply not sure, since it’s the sort of challenge that American businesses are quite good at meeting), so perhaps Gore’s receiving the Peace Prize will simply vindicate their notion that the Nobel Committee is full of whack jobs and loons, just like their founder, Alfred Nobel.

In other news, I’m signing up for Blog Action Day, which is Monday, October 15.  Plus, I’m continuing to accept donations for the Office of Letters and Light through; check out the link below.

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