Someday we’ll have a new house, and so we hope that Ian Boyle will build us another solstice-catching pillar. (Lots of pics here of the pillar in our yard now.) “Charles, the winter solstice is coming up, and we need to measure the angle of the sunrise, so Ian can orient the pipe correctly,” I said, more or less.
Charles took his compass outside at sunrise and measured the direction of the sunrise. “Hmm,” he thought, “this angle seems familiar.” Well, it’s exactly the same angle that our pillar’s pipe is oriented in order to catch the summer solstice sunset.
Okay, we should have been able to figure that out on our own. But we didn’t even think of it. And I thought we were sort of in touch with nature. Obviously, this is the kind of thing you miss, when you spend all your time knitting and crocheting.