Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle

Ugh.  Worked absolutely flat out for about eight and a half hours today, powered by gallons of tea and several biscuits.  I was able to make a sizeable dent in the pile of work though, but I should be glad for a holiday.

Worrying that I'd not taken a single photo all day, I was staring out of the bedroom window as I often do when decompressing after work, and noticed the half moon, in the very last phase of waxing crescent, high in the sky and quite bright, so I whipped out the tripod and the big lens.  There was a lot of thin cloud racing across the sky so it took several attempts for a decent photograph.

There is an interesting theory that the eponymous nursery rhyme owes much of its form to astronomy: the cat (Leo) and the fiddle (Lyra), the cow (Taurus, or at least, his Mrs), the moon itself, the dog (Canis Minor), and perhaps more of a stretch, the dish and spoon being Ursa Major and Ursa Minor that align with the moon at the winter solstice.  It could also be an incredible coincidence and that it is all nonsense verse.  The Rutles did a good version of it, though.

After a rather emergency dinner of spicy rice with lots of vegetables, I delivered the last of my Christmas cards to masterflum, too briefly of this parish, which allowed me a pulse-raising couple of miles' walk in the mud and fresh air and a brief hello.