I was asked by sparrow59
how far we live from the restless volcanoes.   I don’t know
how many miles it is.  There is a chain of them across Cook Inlet,
stretching out to the Southwest toward the Aleutian Islands.  We
are far enough away not to experience pyroclastic flows, and close
enough to hear the booms and feel the shakes during an eruption. 
We have experienced significant ashfall here from four separate
eruptive sequences in the past twenty years.

We had a pink sunset yesterday, but by the time I got the camera and got out there, most of the color had faded.

Volcanologists visited Fourpeaked Volcano on September 24 to install
new sensors.  On September 25,  the image below was captured
by Michael Poland.  Fourpeaked, Cleveland, and Veniaminof are all
still at concern level yellow, considered worth watching.

I hadn’t been thinking about volcanoes until I got an email from NASA Science News with a link to this article about how and why arctic volcanoes have a greater effect on global weather than “normal” tropical volcanoes.

Weather here has been wet and windy.  After the great typhoon
Xangsane tore up the Phillippines and Vietnam, it blew itself out over
the North Pacific and when all that warm moist air met our cooler
arctic air, it started dumping water on us.  It hasn’t stopped yet.
 

I have been deriving an inordinate amount of pleasure from watching a
couple of clumps of Coprinus mushrooms develop and decompose.  It
started with that photo I posted a while ago:

A few days later, I noticed another clump of Coprinus coming up near the base of the cat ramp, on the other side of it.

Just in case you didn’t recognize the
decaying remains of the original clump in the background above, it’s in
the right foreground of the shot below.

I was checking on the progressive
development and decomposition several times a day.  A few days
later I got the camera and documented how, as the new caps grew taller
and opened and a few new nubbins had emerged, the old cluster was
decaying into black slime.  The common name for this genus is,
“inky cap.”

The small, unopened caps at bottom right
above are at the best stage for eating, but I was too interested in
watching them grow to pick them.  Below is a close-up of the bare
wrecked stalks of the first clump that same day:

I continued watching their life cycle,
and yesterday after a frosty night weakened the stalks and hastened
their demise, I took the shots below.

I caught Albion just as he lifted his head from sniffing at the shrooms.

---

Something Quite Different

Gray’s First Sober Year
by William Notter

This new life is better
than a dozen beer-joint romances
or a hundred drunks at fishing camp.
My habit now is not drinking,
and waking up where I belong.
I can see colors again,
and I don’t feel like a turd in the punchbowl
whenever I go around people.

I’ll mow the weeds for Sharon
and almost enjoy it. She’s even given up
checking my breath whenever I come home.
I went shopping for our anniversary
and wound up crying in the store,
but not the kind of tears you cry
when your wife catches you lying in the shed
with your pistol jabbed up in your mouth
and vodka running out your nose.

The only thing she could think to do
was check me into another detox,
and this time it finally took.
This year has made me different—
vodka could never do that for long.
Some days when I wake up early
and listen to Sharon lying there breathing,
it feels like somebody snuck in while we slept
and changed our sheets.

This poem really got to me (in a good way) when I heard it on The Writers Almanac.