This Has Remained One of My Favorite Poems For Quite Some Time Now.

It's a short poem written in a simple, beautiful language. The smooth meter allows the words to flow into one another up to the last stanza where it seems as though the narrator begins to remember the scene where one memory calls upon another, and another. The visual imagery in this piece allows the reader to wind their way through this experience as if they were there themselves with the narrator a that moment. Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy WE stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro—
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves. In other news, Calvin and I made an attempt at building a box cider press. Though it seemed simple enough, the directions proved to be incredibly unhelpful and the pictures lacked enough detail to figure out how to make the board that does the pressing push downward. Choosing a box design was our biggest mistake, because the pressing board also has to be square and remain stationary inside the press. It's easier to make a cider press with a round pressing plate, because it can spin so you can simply build a frame with a nut mortised into the top board, run a threaded rod through it, and then use another board as a lever. A 5 gal. plastic pail would be used in this latter design, unlike the first one we tried building which is made entirely of wood. This can cause a number of problems, the major one being that if you're using a soft wood you'd have to seal it so the flavor of the pine, or whatever soft wood you're using, doesn't leak into the juice. Here's the link to the page where we go the idea for the first press First Design Like I said, the guy didn't really explain the construction all that well. Here's the one we're going to try making next. It seems a lot more promising. Second Design I'll try to have some pictures of the building process posted later on. And to end, this silly beret feline is a random little gem that I found on the internet today. It made me laugh, and I think maybe it will make you laugh too.