T is for Thoreau, author of Walden and many many journals in which "[he omitted] the unusual - the hurricanes and earthquakes - and described  the common."  He had always recorded the weather and the natural scene in a sporadic and fragmented way, but in July of 1852 he declared a year of observation, a 'year' that lasted through 1861.  Amidst the the poetry of his prose, and his record of his own responses to the world, he began a careful…