sleep deprivation

A cursive-looking shadow of bare branches on a snowy gravel road.

a small bird’s shadow
crossing the snow

Haiku and snapshot both collected on this afternoon’s walk, though I didn’t link the two till I got back. I wanted a cursive font, so I edited it in GIMP on the laptop until I found one that worked. I actually preferred a different font, Rose of Baltimore, which seemed to have a more haiku feel, but the lower-case O’s looked too much like A’s, so for readability’s sake I went with a font called Work in Progress instead, with a kerning of -3. The one thing I neglected to do was to gray it out a bit, so the text ends up being a bit more dominant than I’d like. But since I’m a blogger and not a perfectionist, I’m not going to re-do it now. Lunch is calling.

trail maps

long parallel shadows of trees on the snow crossed by a squirrel's track

the easy chair’s
mountain

A few evenings ago, I was sitting on the folded-up futon reading when I looked over and noticed the chair in the corner piled high with trail maps, also looking very settled in and cozy. After a few overly verbose attempts I settled on the wording here. The next day I took a snapshot that sort of worked, but I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic — probably because I’d left the house with the intention of finding an image to accompany the haiku. This direct approach rarely works for me in videopoetry either. Then yesterday, just capturing images that spoke to me on their own, I came up with what would, I realized this morning, make a much better haiga.

I just love the long shadows this time of year. (Those are gray squirrel tracks, by the way.)