Actually, there were a bunch of photos from last summer that I intended to post, from the bread that I made to the "circus tent" fabric that earned me a couple hundred dollars and temporarily took over the entire first floor of my house. But I'm in Zambia and uploading pictures takes a long time, and and and I'm not going to do it.

But one thing I do want to post, which pictures have already been updated, is a series of photographs I took in New Jersey, the day after a big rainstorm, when we walked along a trail that had been closed the first three days of our trip due to a forest fire. The album is probably still too heavy on the more strikingly burned pictures (one of the things that surprised me is how un-burned it was, actually), but the swaths of charred soil make for more interesting pictures than the slightly browned undergrowth.

One thing that surprised me was how beautiful I found it, in an odd, moonscape sort of way. My mother said that it was beautiful in the way that ugly babies are "beautiful;" they aren't actually attractive, but you can't stop looking at them. But I think it was more than that. I'm accustomed to associating greenery with beauty, but this partially burned landscape was, in its own way, beautiful.

Forest fire remains in Wharton State Forest