June 20, 2026 · 23:37

Happy Solstice 2026

In about two hours as I write this, at 01:21 AM PDT on Sunday, June 21st (08:24 UTC), we’ll be at the summer solstice, where the Sun appears at it’s most northern point and the hours of daylight are at their maximum in the Northern Hemisphere and at their shortest in the Southern Hemisphere.

I spent much of the day making plans and reservations for July. Since we’ve been up here in Hesperia, we haven’t been to an Angels game in Anaheim, and we haven’t seen fireworks. With the upcoming July 4th weekend, we’re going to go down the hill for the entire three-day, three-game series against the Red Sox, with fireworks every night.

July 21st will be our 25th wedding anniversary for the Long-Suffering Wife and me, we’re looking at a couple of days in Las Vegas (where we went on our honeymoon) to celebrate.

And July 22nd is the one-year anniversary of us closing escrow and moving into our Forever Home, that we’re still in love with. Not sure how to “celebrate” that – maybe by finishing up some of the still pending unpacking tasks…

What else can the next six weeks hold in terms of celebrations and joyous occasions? I can think of a couple of my wish list, for which we have multiple bottles of champagne chilling 24/7/365. C’mon Fates, let’s make it happen!!!

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Filed under Paul, Photography

June 19, 2026 · 22:50

Today’s Backyard Mystery

Out on the pergola I have a lounge chair to plotz in. It’s fairly heavy, and it’s normally a foot or so from the edge with the back against the cinder blocks and one of the support posts for the pergola to block it from sliding. Plus, the floor isn’t smooth, it’s ribbed with the planks that make up the floor. The short version is that it’s not that easy to move, even when I want to move it.

This morning everything was normal at 9:00-ish when I went out for breakfast. But about 10:45, it was cattywampus.

No harm, but my brain immediately went to, “What moved it?” Up here the wind is always a suspect, but the winds were calm. I hadn’t heard any of the wind chimes going off, and none of the other lawn chairs or anything else in the back yard had been disturbed.

No way that the squirrels could have pushed it or moved it, even if all dozen of them had pushed at once. And they were out there looking at it like they were wondering what was going on also.

Birds? The biggest we normally see are the pigeons, but they’re always on the turf, not on the chairs. What’s on the chairs are the sparrows and wrens, but they’re all way too small.

I guess it might have been one of the ravens, if it was on the back or the arm and pushed off hard to get airborne. Or a big hawk. An eagle? I haven’t seen them, but I know they’re in the area.

An earthquake will eventually toss everything around, and probably topple the pergola and break all of our windows and worse, but that obviously didn’t happen.

One of these days we’ll probably have a Great Dane and they’re quite capable, but we don’t have one yet. There’s a stray cat that is seen now and then, but again, they’re not that big.

Remember the potential triffid growing about ten feet away on the left? So far it’s my most likely candidate, if it IS a triffid and not an onion of some sort. It’s exercising its mobility and muscles and tossing furniture about willy nilly.

Or maybe we have a back yard poltergeist.

It’s a mystery.

 

 

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography

June 18, 2026 · 23:30

It Might Actually Be A Triffid

This odd plant (and another that’s fallen over behind it, or been knocked down by squirrels) has popped up in the back yard.

Maybe a leaf or two at the base, but nothing on this big, curvy, thick stalk, topped by this fuzzy ball.

The ball turns out to be made up of a bunch of small flowers.

I don’t really think it’s a triffid but you can’t be too careful when you’re dealing with an alien invasion…

I’m guessing some sort of rugged, drought resistant, desert plant that found a friendly spot in our gravel.

(My plant ID app on my iPhone has a best guess of a “wild leek” or “wild onion” – another says it’s a “chapparel yucca.” Intereting! I know that the yucca trees are protected, we had to sign a document when we bought the house acknowledging that we are aware of that and we agreed not to cut down any yucca trees. So for now, this little guy is safe from us, but the squirrels are independent agents!)

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Filed under Critters, Flowers, Forever Home, Photography

June 17, 2026 · 23:39

Sunset Conjunction 2026 – Big Finale

Mind you, the key players (Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury) will all be up there for at least another week or more, but tomorrow the Moon will have moved up beyond Venus, Jupiter will have dimmed a bit more and moved down toward Mercury. I don’t know if there’s a “technical” definition of what constitutes an astronomical conjunction (X number of bodies withing Y degrees?) but gut feeling is that it’s almost over.

But tonight, still…

It was looking pretty nice up there in a clear, desert sky. Three-day old Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury (just above the tree at the lower right).

And even with the (carefully) hand-held iPhone, I can zoom in on the crescent Moon and Venus and see some details on the portion of the Moon illuminated by Earthshine.

I was also shooting photos with the good DSLR and lenses. I still haven’t downloaded and reviewed them. We’ll see later if there’s anything there that’s special and worth sharing.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography

June 16, 2026 · 23:24

Four-Body Conjunction

From top left to bottom right, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, Mercury.

It was beautiful! And clear, fortunately. My daughter who lives down in LA had nothing but that coastal low cloud layer to look at.

Mercury got left out of the close-up, but the two-day old crescent Moon was a diamond!

Mercury is always elusive, and it’s nearing the furthest away from the Sun that it ever gets, but it’s been surprisingly easy to see this trip around into the evening sky.

Keep watching, they’ll be playing this dance for a few more days. If you don’t have clouds!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets

June 15, 2026 · 23:33

Less Than 25 Hours

The Moon was New at 19:54 PDT on Sunday. I wasn’t going to go out looking for the barely one-day old Moon tonight, because I ***NEVER*** see the crescent Moon before at least a day and a half to two days after New.

Surprise! At 20:47 tonight, less than 25 hours after New Moon, there it was, a fingernail of light, just barely above the horizon and the neighbor’s roof.

I don’t know that I’ve ever gone back inside, grabbed the camera and tripod, and got back outside and ready to shoot so fast.

Of course, Venus and Jupiter are still up there, separating now that they’re past last week’s conjunction, as Jupiter dives toward it’s passage behind the Sun. (If Jupiter ever goes between us and the Sun, we’re in deep shit.)

And if you click on this picture and blow it up nice and big on your screen and look just a bit above the peak of the roof and just a smidgen to the right, about halfway between Jupiter and the Moon, there’s Mercury.

Three planets, the Moon, and a great sunset! What more could you ask for?

Go look tomorrow night just after sunset – the Moon will be a little more illuminated and up there about halfway between Mercury and Jupiter. IT SHOULD LOOK SPECTACULAR!!!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets

June 14, 2026 · 21:59

Fine Feathered Friends – June 14th

Sunset-ish, I was re-filling the bird seed feeders out in the back on the pergola. In hanging a couple of the refilled feeders up I apparently spooked a half-dozen or more large ravens that were on the ground in the dirt lot on the far side of the wall.

Whatever it was they were doing they took noisy exception to being disturbed, and started screaming and dive bombing me.

I pointed out to them that I was the one leaving grapes for them in the front yard and I didn’t feel like being screamed at. Besides, there’s a line for that, if they were going to scream at me they needed to wait their turn.

Meanwhile I whipped out my phone and started shooting off quick pictures at random, figuring if I ended up like a Hitchcock victim at least there would be evidence of how it happened.

Half went off to roost on the power line towers out across the way, the other half went to polish off the rest of the grapes. I survived to tell the tale.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography

June 13, 2026 · 23:11

Normally I LOVE To Hear Aircraft Overhead

(Very limited photos available, although I shot 109 excellent images – all 10,000% overexposed because the camera was accidentally left set up for the Jupiter & Venus conjunction. I am become Moron, destroyer of photos.)

This afternoon I started having the Watch Duty app on my phone going off like a pinball machine. It gives alerts and updates for brush fires all over SoCal and it’s been doing that pretty steadily for the last week or two. (It’s going to be a really long summer…) I really wasn’t paying attention to the details.

I was in my office and heard the heavy thrumming of a big multi-engine aircraft going over, something like a military C-130. Cool. About two minutes later I heard another one. Cool. And again. And again.

Not cool.

That’s not a series of aircraft that just happen to be going overhead. That’s one aircraft that’s circling. And with no airports or airshows nearby, there’s only one reason for a big aircraft to be circling overhead.

I’ve seen this dance. And there are four other aircraft out there. Ten months here, I’ve NEVER seen five separate aircraft near or overhead at once. Are they…?

Yep, all of them orbiting, all of them with the government.

Ladies & gents, we have a brush fire and it’s close. Down in the Cajon Pass, over the edge of The Mesa, by the train tracks, probably less than a mile away.

Now, I’m not worried. They’ve got a lot of resorces working this one quickly. A quick trip outside shows no smoke visible. The wind is at our back, so even if it spreads, it’s spreading out into the (mostly) empty lands in the Cajon Pass. And even if it does somehow come up over the edge of The Mesa and move this way, our particular tract of homes is surrounded by a LOT of empty dirt lots that will make a GREAT fire break in an emergency.

But we’re getting private airshow!

An air boss, a couple of smaller spotter planes, the big water bomber, all doing passes over our house at about a thousand feet. I’m loving it. Off in the distance where the fire had been, on the far side of those huge water tanks you see over our back wall, a Sikorsky Sky Crane and a couple of smaller Bell Rangers are making smaller water drops on hot spots.

As I said, it’s going to be a long, hot, dry summer. Buckle up and stand by. Now that we’re more or less fully settled here, it might be a good to find time to review the 5-minute, 15-minute, 30-minute, and 60-minute bug out checklists.

Just because.

 

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Filed under Disasters, Flying, Forever Home, Photography

June 12, 2026 · 23:02

Lonely Little Cloud

Bringing the trash cans up from the street this morning, there was a thin line of clouds filling in the Cajon pass, their tops just below the rim of The Mesa (I think you can just catch a glimpse of them along the the lower left edge), but everything else in sight just a crystal clear, blue dome – except for this one, tiny, little cloud.

No clue what might be down that way to trigger a bit of air pressure differential of a plume of dust for the clouds to use as nucleates. Nothing off in that direction other than the high school, the Palmdale Bypass railroad tracks, and the freeway.

Mysteries, man!

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Filed under Photography, Weather

June 11, 2026 · 23:32

Proof Of Life – June 11th

Once I was here, one of the best trips ever and one of my favorite places to visit. (Prague!)

Now I’m not. Now I’m doing audits and bank reconciliations and monthly reports and dealing with malfunctioning software and broken computers and annoying medical systems.

I prefer Prague. How do I do more THIS and less of THAT?

Seriously!

In a rut? I leanred all the way back in high school (back when dirt was young and we had just discovered fire) that, “A rut is just a grave with the ends knocked out.” Still true.

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Filed under Photography, Travel