The heavily-flooded Maas (Meuse), which here functions as the border between the Dutch provinces of Gelderland (to left, north in this photo) and Noord Brabant. Took this, plus the shots of two different castles in two different villages below, during a 26 December walk with my friend Kiki while visiting her for a lovely Christmas-holiday afternoon.
Three important things happened today in my world: 1) The sun actually shone for most of the afternoon; 2) Clouds were sufficiently absent long enough for the sun to be still shining as it sank beneath the horizon (below, at 4:41:08 according to my camera — above was at 4:25:39); and, most important in my little world, the earth has rotated enough now that it actually shines in the windows on my balcony for a few short minutes at the end of its time above our horizon here. (For a comparison sunset further north and west plus several hours later, check this past post from early August: my windows face mostly north, a decent amount of west, with only one little sliver of southwest.) Note that it might have shone in a bit for a couple days now, but with clouds omnipresent nearly full-time since early October (I do not exaggerate), wouldn’t know. So this is just me sending a bonus post to let the sun feel appreciated and welcomed.
A bonus video from a harbor walk that (my cousin) Sam & I did en route to a concert during his visit in October, for those with bandwidth to view it – posting it separately in hopes it’ll work better this way.
Point 1: I realized to my chagrin that I skipped this series in the last number cycle, so we’re catching up; Point 2: The oldest canals have been collapsing bit by bit, so the city of A’dam has a massive multi-year budget to slowly shore them up, since the center city’s canals and streets are so old that they were never built for the sheer volume of tourists, buses, cars, etc that load the roads alongside them now – this being an example of the repairs on one canal in the heart of the old city.
(so much world, so little time....) 